[mapserver-dev] Heads-up of students interacting with MapServer community

[Jeff McKenna]

Hi devs,

I had earlier sent a message out to OSGeo's Discuss mailing list, but 
should have sent one here also: young highschool students are now 
competing in a Google contest called the "Code-In" where 1400+ young 
students from around the world (500+ schools) do short 3-5 hour tasks in 
Open Source projects.

This year we/OSGeo submitted our first application to participate, and 
we were accepted (only 25 projects/organizations were approved).

Note that these short tasks are not all coding related, but also design, 
outreach, documentation; the goal is to get these young future 
developers interested in OSGeo and its projects.  This is the 3rd week 
and it is fascinating seeing all the activity!  You can see the list of 
OSGeo projects participating here: 
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Code_In_2017_Recommendations_for_Students 
   Or you can see the full list of organizations participating at 
https://codein.withgoogle.com/organizations/

For MapServer, Assefa and I have created a few tasks (as "mentors" for 
the students), which some of you might have seen reported here on the 
dev list.  Just fun ways to get students interested in MapServer.

The contest runs until 18 January.

Thanks all!

I hope this tradition continues for OSGeo every year now.

-jeff

-on behalf of GCI admins
(I'm helping admin, and as a mentor for students)