[SoC] OSGeo & Google Code-in 2017/2018: a great success to introduce students into the geospatial Open Source community

[Margherita Di Leo]

*OSGeo & Google Code-in 2017/2018: a great success to introduce students
into the geospatial Open Source communityAfter participating many years in
the Google Summer of Code, OSGeo recently participated for the first time
in the Google Code-in. Google Code-in is a contest held each year to
introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to Open Source software
development. Since 2010, over 4500 students in 99 countries have completed
work in the contest. Students compete to win prizes of certificates,
t-shirts, hoodies, and a possible free trip to Google headquarters in
California, U.S.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; each task should take only 3 to 5 hours to complete, and
can involve not only coding but also important community work such as
documentation, outreach, communication, quality assurance/testing, and user
interface design. 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.OSGeo administrators began working on OSGeo’s first
application to Google back in early November.  It was a huge undertaking,
as mentor organizations create hundreds of tasks for the potentially
thousands of students to work on during the contest period and are
responsible for assigning mentors to help students with questions and to
review students’ work on the tasks.OSGeo mentors and admins prepared 176
tasks related to its geospatial projects like GeoForAll, GeoServer, GRASS
GIS, gvSIG, MapServer, OpenLayers, OSGeoLive, pgRouting, and QGIS.This
year’s contest was held from 28 November 2017 until 17 January 2018, and
had almost triple the number of students of the previous year.  A total of
279 young students completed 649 tasks for OSGeo (530 students in total
examined OSGeo tasks). OSGeo students were from many countries including:
India, Poland, Pakistan, Thailand, United States, Russia, Germany,
Cameroon, Singapore, Spain, Romania, UK, Vietnam, Dominican Republic,
Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Canada, and others.  The students were
guided and supported by a great team of OSGeo mentors. OSGeo’s GCI mentors
and admins evaluated the results of the students according to the following
factors: creativity, thoroughness, and quality of work. An additional
criterium was the contribution to the community by interacting with and
helping others.OSGeo is pleased to announce the Google Code-in Grand Prize
winners (who each receive a free trip to Google headquarters, along with a
parent/guardian) are students: - Sunveer Singh (India)- Jerry Huang (United
States)OSGeo’s Google Code-in finalists (who receive Google hoodies) are: -
Ethan Zhao (United States)- Neev Mistry (United States)- Shailesh Kadam
(India)See here: https://codein.withgoogle.com/winners/#winners
<https://codein.withgoogle.com/winners/#winners> the winners from all
organizations.OSGeo wholeheartedly congratulates the winners and finalists.
We also thank all students working on OSGeo’s tasks for their great
contributions to the OSGeo community.All this wouldn’t be possible without
the guidance by our mentors. OSGeo is deeply grateful for their hard work
over 2 months of the contest.  We are also grateful to Google for welcoming
OSGeo into the contest as a GCI mentoring organization for the first
time.This has been a magical and fun experience, seeing the enthusiasm of
the students for OSGeo, and how that fun trickles through the entire
community. Thank you to everyone involved.--OSGeo GCI admins
2017/2018Links:https://codein.withgoogle.com/
<https://codein.withgoogle.com/>https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/?sp-search=OSGeo
<https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/?sp-search=OSGeo>*


-- 
Margherita Di Leo
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