Google CodeIn

[Chad Windnagle]

Hi Joomla Devs:

Many of you probably know that Joomal recently completed the Google Summer of Code Program. By all counts, it was a major success for the project. We are now currently toying with the idea of participating in Google CodeIn. This is similar to GSoC, except it includes tasks outside of coding, and it's designed for high school age students. (GSoC was only programming, and for college students of all ages)

More information is here:

http://code.google.com/opensource/gci/2012/index.html

If you would be interested in helping to mentor in the program please let me know. We have to apply still (haven't yet), but before we do, I'd like to gauge the amount of interest / help available in the community before we jump in and do more than we're capable of doing. 

[elin]

I thought I'd add a few details about what mentoring in gci involves, it's very different than in gsoc.

GCI projects are small. this weekend I went to a session about GCI as part of the GSoC mentor summit.  The people from the open source programs office said that they wanted tasks that would take an experienced developer about 2 hours to do. Obviously that means it would likely take a student developer who was not familiar with Joomla longer but not weeks longer. The mentor on the task is the one who decides if the task has been successfully completed or not. Thus he or she needs to have the necessary skills to understand if that has happened. So you are not making a 3 month, 8 hour a week commitment like you are with gsoc but you are making other commitments.  Google ha simplified the program in some ways which would make it easier to manage.

We haven't listed the tasks yet (for the application we need just 25 examples but for the gci as a whole probably it would be more like 150 total over the 5 categories which we would trickle out over the course of the contest).  If we do want to do it we would need a meaningful size group of mentors including people with experience in each of the different areas. So  if we don't have good interest level in helping with that there is not really any point in applying especially since selection will be so competitive.

Elin