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How to organise a successful Google Code-In meetup

In this blog post I hope to write about what is Google Code-In and the best way to organise a successful Google Code-In meetup or workshop in your local community. I hope you will find everything that you need to know about conducting a successful meetup. What is Google Code-In ? Google Code-In is a global and an open source contest funded by Google to give real world software development experience to pre-university students who are in age range 13-17. Beside of software developing, this contest’s main objective is to motivate tech enthusiastic students to contribute to opensource and give them the knowledge about open source software development. The usual timeline of the contest is, it opens for students on end of the November and runs until mid of January. There are 25 open source organizations participating for Google Code-In this time. Your role ? As a GCI mentor , past GCI student or an open source contributor you have a responsibility towards the community. That is to expand the community awareness and transfer your knowledge to next generation. You gather experience while working on the open source projects and GCI is the best place to give your knowledge to youngsters while working with them. You should be devoted to guide students and give them an introduction to open source software development. How students can be a part of the contest ? Any pre-university student in age group 13-17 can register for the contest. The following four steps needs to be followed by the student to be eligible to compete in the contest. Sign up at g.co/gci after reading the Contest Rules. Ask their parent or legal guardian to sign the Parental Consent form. Find a task that interests them. Claim the task and start working while getting guidance from the mentors. In return to their hard work and open source contribution, students can win digital certificates, t-shirts, hoodies based on their performance as well as a trip to Google HeadQuarters for Grand Prize Winner. How to organize a local meetup ? Since the Google Code-In contest is for pre-university students, I highly recommend that you organize a meetup for schools in the community. You can easily contact the club or society of the school which is related to Information and Communication Technology and convey your idea of the meetup so that the responsible person can get the management approval from their side to facilitate your meetup inside the school. If you are not confident enough to conduct a session on your own maybe because this is a new experience to you, Don’t worry ! You can always call some other past GCI students, GCI mentors or open source contributors to collaborate with you in conducting a successful session. As open source world teaches us, it’s always collaboration that brings success to any project. Taking the start to the meetup, you need to give an introduction to the Google Code-In. You may find different questions from the audience about “What…

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FOSSASIA at Google Code-In 2016 Grand Prize Trip

This year FOSSASIA came up with a whopping number of GCI participants, making it to the top. FOSSASIA is a mentor organization at the Google Code-In contest, which introduces pre-university students towards open source development. Every year Google conducts the grand prize trip to all the GCI winners and I represented FOSSASIA as a mentor. FOSSASIA GCI winners and Mentor at Google Mountain View Campus. Day 1: Meet and Greet with the Diverse Communities We all headed towards the San Francisco Google office and had a great time interacting with members from diverse open source organizations from different parts of the world. I had some interactive conversations with the kids, on how they scheduled their sleep hours in order to complete the task and got feedback from the mentors from different time zones! I was also overwhelmed while listening to their interests apart from open source contributions. “I am a science enthusiast, mainly interested in Computer Science and its wide range of applications. I also enjoy playing the piano, reading, moving, and having engaging conversations with my friends. As a participant in the GCI contest, I got the chance to learn by doing, I got an insight of how it is like to work on a real open-source project, met some great people, helped others (and received help myself). Shortly, it was amazing, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. ” Shared by one of our Winner Oana Rosca. There were people from almost 14 different countries, in fact, FOSSASIA, as a team, was the most diverse group :) Day 2: Award Ceremony We had two winners from FOSSASIA, Arkhan Kaiser from Indonesia and Oana Rosca from Romania. There were 8 organizations with 16 winners. The award ceremony was celebrated on day 2 and each winner was felicitated by Chris DiBona, the director of the Google open source team. Talks by Googlers We had amazing speakers from Google who spoke about their work, experiences, and journey to Google. Our first speaker was Jeremy Allison, a notable contributor to “Samba” which is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. He spoke on “How the Internet works” and gave a deeper view of the internet magic. We had various speakers from different domains such as Grant Grundler from the Chrome team, Lyman Missimer from Google Expeditions, Katie Dektar from the Making and Science team, Sean Lip from Oppia(Googler and Oppia org admin), Timothy Papandreou from Waymo and Andrew Selle from TensorFlow. Day 3: Fun Activities We had various fun activities organized by the Google team. I had a great time cruising towards the Alcatraz island.  Later we had a walk on the Golden Gate bridge. Here comes the fun part of the tour “the cruise dinner” which was the best part of the day. Day 4: End of the trip Oana, Arkhan and I gave a nice presentation about our work during GCI. We spoke about all the amazing projects under FOSSASIA. One cool thing we did…

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Being a mentor ! #GoogleCodeIn

Google Code-In 2015/2016 just concluded and it was an enriching experience to be a prime segment of this cool initiative. It feels great to have worked as a Mentor for Google Code-In 2015/2016 under FOSSASIA organization :) I strongly believe that helping people steer their careers in the right direction is a key element in developing. The esteemed task of mentoring is an essential leadership skill. In addition to managing and motivating people, it's also important that one can help others learn, grow and become more effective in their lives. My experience with mentoring Google Code-In tells me that mentoring is a rewarding experience, both personally and professionally. It not only aids in improving communication skills but also brings about a a great sense of personal satisfaction. One gains a new perspective of thinking and gets to advance technical skills by learning together with the mentee. The mentor-ship experience was a surreal one. I never knew my answers and feedback to simple questions could be the cause of someone's high spirits. It made me realize the impact one's guidance could have on a budding developer. My feeling of immense contentment was augmented by the innocent tweets and blog posts of the mentees expressing their gratitude and happiness. (refer a few screenshots attached :D ) The journey in this field will urge to shed all inhibitions, keep pride aside and dive into this worthy mission of building a powerful community. The small interesting conversations and tasks will sometimes leave a deep impact on the mentor as a person, after-all not everyday one comes across a student submitting "Peace Pledge: No ! To war and distrust" to his/her mentor where both belong to two countries supposedly at 'cold war' ;) I am also of the view that by being a mentor to a newbie, we pay our regards to the entire computing sphere and its fraternity. Helping the mentee have a smooth transition into the tech world helps make long lasting associations and ensure a better future. A season of mentoring gone by, excited for another already !

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Kids Coding with FOSSASIA and Google Code-In

After the successful Google Summer of Code we are very happy and honored to participate for the second year in Google Code-In. The contest introduces pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development and runs from December 7 2015 until January 25, 2016. Learn more here.Because Google Code-in is often the first experience many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy for students to jump right in. Open source organizations chosen by Google provide a list of tasks for students to work on during the seven week contest period. A unique part of the contest is that each task has mentors from the organization assigned should students have questions or need help along the way.

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FOSSASIA Google Code-In Students and Mentor at Googleplex Mountain View

Last week grand prize winners from FOSSASIA and other organizations that participated in Google Code-In 2014 attended a trip to the US accompanied by a guardian and a mentor. The grand prize trip is the crowning activity of Google Code In, the program organized by Google with the aim of introducing pre-university students to open source. I was fortunate enough to take part as the mentor representing FOSSASIA.2014 was FOSSASIA's first participation in GCI and it was a great success for us.The trip kicked off on the evening of the 7th June with a 'meet and greet' at the hotel lobby. Stephanie Taylor and Mary Radomile from Google OSPO welcomed us. I met Namanyay Goel and Samarjeet Singh, the two winners from fossasia, and a bunch of other winning students and mentors. Groups of students were quick to engage in lively discussions, It was hard to believe that most of them met for the first time. I was glad to learn that both our winning students enjoyed the contest as much as I did. At the end of the two hours both students and mentors were holding on to some rewards from Google. As I was tired from the long flight I bid everyone an early goodbye to get a much needed sleep.I met Namanyay and Samarjeet, Grand prize winners from FOSSASIA.The next morning we met in the hotel lobby again. We were to spend the day in the Google headquarters in Mountain View. The San Francisco traffic delayed our buses a bit but we arrived at the Googleplex to a pleasant breakfast. In the morning we listened to talks from Engineers of Google projects Ara and Tango. A series of interesting questions from an enthusiastic audience followed each talk. Chris DiBona, the director of the Google OSPO presented winners their awards. After a lunch where students got to enjoy with Googlers from their respective countries, we were back for more talks. The one from Google's rapidly evolving self driving cars, caught a lot of attention. We also got to visit the Google visitor center, where we met famous giant Androids, and to the Google store, where everyone bought a bunch of souvenirs to take back home.Third day of the tour was the 'fun day'. Each of us were to choose between visiting the Alcatraz island which was the home to the historic federal prison, the Exploratorium, a science and arts museum and a segway tour around San Francisco. About half of the group and I picked segways. We rode the brilliantly engineered machines around the city while our guide entertained us with interesting facts about the city. It was a novel experience for everyone. The three groups met for the lunch and set off to see the famous Golden gate bridge, where we spent the afternoon. A Yacht course across the San Francisco bay, during which we sailed under the Golden Gate, completed a day filled with amazing memories.The final day was spent in the Google office in San…

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Google Code-In Success: FOSSASIA Top-Ranked Organization

FOSSASIA's first participation of Google Code-in contest as a mentoring organizations was a great success with 587 tasks completed, most by any organization this year, out of a total of 725 published tasks. The twelve participating organizations included projects like Wikimedia, Sugarlabs, Sahana, Drupal, KDE and OpenMRS.Students from all around the world aged 13-17 years old worked with mentors of FOSSASIA on improving open source software during the 7 weeks the contest is run. They coded programs, designed artworks, tested software and more than anything else had fun.174 students managed to complete at least one task with FOSSASIA and 43 out of them claimed a cool t-shirt from Google by completing 3 or more tasks.Out of the 10 students who completed most number of tasks finalists and grand prize winners were picked collectively by FOSSASIA's 24 mentors. Namanyay Goel and Samarjeet Singh won the grand prize, which is an all expense paid trip to Google HQ in Mountain View, California. Alvis Wong, Amr Ramadan and Tymon Radzik emerged as finalists. Congratulations finalists! Safe travels grand prize winners! We are thankful for your precious contributions and will be delighted see you continue to contribute even after the program.Open source projects ExpEYES, sup, TiddlySpace, p5.js among few others, benefitted from FOSSASIA students' work. More than 150 open source/ open tech projects and communities around asia were connected to FOSSASIA with the help of students. Students also worked together to build a nice website portraying students and mentors.We would like to thank all participated students for the amazing interest they showed in our tasks. Its great to see some of them still hang around to help us. 24 mentors of FOSSASIA worked hard and stood up to the challenge of finding time to work with and help out students while having other obligations. Thank you mentors! Lastly we are grateful to Stephanie Taylor and Co. at the Google OSPO, for organizing the wonderful contest. Wonderful Surprise: Mentors received a Thank You Package from Google Sleeping peacefully - Nephew of Michael Cheng: Mentor's Family Enjoying "Open Source" Thank you packageLinksFOSSASIA GCI: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasiaGoogle Blog about GCI: http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2015/02/google-code-in-2014-magic-in-numbers.html

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Google Code-In Experience with FOSSASIA

For the last few weeks I got the opportunity to be involved in the Google Code-In 2014 program as a mentor for FOSSASIA (Thanks Andun Sameera!). It was challenging than I thought specially while doing a full time job. But was a great experience and I learned things myself with the students.FOSSASIA's co-admin Mario Behling initiated an interesting project at the start of the program to give students an opportunity to experience open source development culture. The project was to create a small website to hold FOSSASIA's students' and mentors' details. It came out to be a great success with a cute little website being created and more importantly a nice little community of students created around it. Usually there is a barrier you need to get past as a novice contributor, to get your first commit merged in to an open source project. The administrators would want you to follow annoying coding conventions, to "combine your 5 commits, solving a simple small bug into one big commit" or to "rebase your pull request on top of master". Until you continue contributing for some time and realize the importance of those, and start to appreciate them, they are just some annoyance that you have to deal with, on the way to get your work integrated. We for this project initially made this barrier very very less challenging. We would merge pull requests if they do the job. This so that young student contributors don't feel discouraged and only until they get themselves started. But having being well mentored at Google Summer of Code 2013 I wanted some niceties in our git commits. So I made learning them into a task.Google Code-In Mentor Aruna Herath at workThe task was to learn how to make your local commits look nice before you push them to the repo. To make it more organized and can be evaluated, and hopefully fun, I built up a small set of commits with a interesting bit of a commit history; a story. I added the set of commits to a Github repo that includes wrongly commited commit message and two commits that could look better sqashed into a bigger commit. Students are asked to clone the repo and then using git interactive rebase, make the commit history look better. The story of the commits and a set of instructions are given. Then they have to blog about there experience. They came up with some great write ups! Some focused on the technical aspects and were of a tutorial point of view. Some were explaining the personal experience writers themselves got and were on a lighter, less technical, language. However all were great! I think I got few students to learn something that will be valuable in their future careers and also one student to start blogging! When I saw a set of commits that could be better organized in a pull request for any of FOSSASIA's repositories, from a student who completed this task, I asked them to make them better. Thanks to above…

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FOSSASIA joining Google Code-In Program for Students Age 13-17

We are proud to announce that FOSSASIA has been chosen as a mentor organization for Google Code-In 2015. FOSSASIA is one of twelve global organizations participating in the program for students from the 13-17 years old.Google Code-In is a global, online contest for 13-17 year old pre-university students interested in learning more about Open Source development. Students work on bite-sized tasks for real-world open source projects in a variety of categories.Students can register and take over tasks starting from December 1, 2014 and work on tasks until January 19. All tasks are listed on the website at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014Contest TimelineDecember 1, 2014, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: Contest opens for entries by student participantsJanuary 18, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time/ 17:00 UTC: No more tasks can be claimed by students after this timeJanuary 19, 2015, 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 17:00 UTC: All work stops, Contest endsJanuary 26, 2015: Mentoring Organizations submit their grand prize winner nominees to Google Open Source Programs OfficeFebruary 2, 2015: Google Open Source Programs Office announces the grand prize winners via blog postJune 2015: Grand Prize trip to Google and northern California Links* Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014* FOSSASIA at Google Code-In http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/fossasia

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