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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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New York City Hack Manhattan Hackerspace Meetup

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical spaces, where people can meet and work on their projects. Hackerspaces around the world are listed on the hackerspace wiki. Yesterday I had the chance to visit Hack Manhattan.Hack Manhattan is operated as a non-profit community hackerspace in New York City. Equipments includes a mini-mill, sewing machines, soldering irons and reflow tools and several 3D printers. Members work on all kinds of projects. Many are in electronics, 3D printing, and software, but we also brew beer, keep bees on the roof, and garden. I was very happy to meet Real John Connor, Stephen Lynch, and Dave Reeves and learn about their work.I hope we see more hackerspaces in Asia and I would love to support people who are starting them. Let me know on twitter about your hackerspace! http://twitter.com/hpdangLinksHack Manhattan: https://hackmanhattan.comHackerspaces on the Web: http://hackerspaces.org

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Google Reunion in Silicon Valley with FOSSASIA

Being at the get together of more than 500 mentors and students of over 200 projects from 50 countries at the 10th anniversary of Google Summer of Code and join the celebrations at the Reunion 2014 is an amazing experience. It was the first time that Google brought together such a large number of contributors in Silicon Valley for a fantastic Unconference, a great day out at the “Great America” and a Gala at the San Jose Tech Museum with Linus Torvalds and a catering with an outstanding American Fusion cuisine.Yes, 10 years! Google Summer of Code is the only program of a company supporting hundreds of Open Source projects for many years and bringing them together with students from around the world. The magnitude of this support shows the real commitment of Google to Free and Open Source Software and I would like to thank everyone involved including Carol Smith, Cat Allman and Stephanie Taylor, and all the other fantastic people at the Open Source office supporting us. The idea of free sharing and collaboration across borders has always inspired me. And I could not be happier to enter the conference room in San Jose - full of creators, developers, contributors of many amazing Open Source projects such as Mozilla, KDE, Python, Haiku, Blender, GNU, Debian, Inkscape and many more.In previous years, the program brought together mentors of each active organization, but for this years celebration Google also flew in mentors of former years and even some students of the program. As an organizer of our annual FOSSASIA event I know what a challenge it can be to bring in a few dozen speakers from different parts of the world, but flying in 500 Open Source contributors from around the world is a logistic masterpiece. Organizing this event takes a huge amount effort and resources. Two thumbs up for the organizing team, they did an amazing job. I am grateful to be among the participants.Great Day Out at the Great AmericaEvery year the Mentor Summit spreads out in two days filled with interesting unconference sessions, lighting talks, and plenty of spaces for group discussing and code sprints. This time Carol and the team went an extra mile to surprise participants with an additional day-out at the Great America Theme Park (exclusively for us!). Believe it or not the majority of my lovely geek friends apparently have never been to an amusement park in their lives. We had such a great morning and afternoon there. I am sure some of us will never forget that very first roller coaster ride. It is great that Google makes this experience possible for mentors and appreciates their contributions.Gala at the Tech Museum San Jose with Linus TorvaldsAnother of the highlights of this year was the Gala at the Tech Museum in San Jose. Everyone dressed up in beautiful garments. It was fun to see all the developers who kind of always wear black shirts suddenly dressed up. And, on top of organizing everything…

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