[SoC] Call for Google Code-in mentors

[Helmut Kudrnovsky]

Dear OSGeo Community,

a few days ago we had a virtual kickoff meeting about Google Code-in. [1]

* What is Google Code-in [2]:

"Pre-university students ages 13 to 17 are invited to take part in Google Code-in: Our global, online, contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source. With a wide variety of bite-sized tasks, it’s easy for beginners to jump in and get started no matter what skills they have. Mentors from our participating organizations lend a helping hand as participants learn what it’s like to work on an open source project."
 
* How it works [3]: 
 
1  Students search for a task that interests them and claim it. They have at least three days to complete it. 
2  The student works on the task, getting guidance from mentors, if needed.   
3  Once the student is ready, they submit their work for review through the contest website.  
4  Mentors from the organization evaluate the work, provide feedback, and if it's complete, accept it! Otherwise, specific feedback is provided, and the student goes back to step #2!   
5  Go to step #1 and repeat!

* Example tasks may be:

** Coding
- Add a new (simple) option to a GRASS python module
- ...

** Documentation/Training
- Make a video introducing the various projects under OSGeo
- ...

** Outreach/Research
- Write a fancy blog post about the new cool QGIS 3D capabilities
- ...

** Quality Assurance
- Add a Test Case for xyz to the GDAL testsuite
- ...

** User Interface

- Add icons for specific GIS task
- ...

* Time effort of the tasks should not be longer as 3 to 5 hours!!!


Members of other orgs, which participated in the last years, have joint our kickoff meeting.

Lessons learned from the last years' participations:

* a strategic plan needed to generate a pool of tasks doable in 3-5 hours (beginner to advanced tasks); from ~50 up to ~100 tasks!!
* a large enough mentor pool that the contest can going on over the period to tackle evaluations of about ~ 100 tasks!!

If you are a willing mentor, just write to gsoc-admin(at)osgeo.org and a form to fill in will be sent to you.

At the moment, the mentor pool seems not be large enough to apply for Google Code-in.

What we have heard from other orgs already participated: Google Code-in is fun, nice results for e.g. outreach, though the workload has to be planned
 
Kind regards

Helmut (on behalf of the OSGeo GSoC admin team)
OSGeo charter member

[1] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Code_In_2017#Kickoff_.28virtual.29_meeting
[2] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/
[3] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/how-it-works
[4] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/resources/example-tasks