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2010 November 5 [Friday]

Google Code-In 2010

By SVAKSHA on 2010 November 5 [Friday], 23:23:00

Today Google announced the list of participating organizations for Google Code-in --earlier known as GHOP, is targeting school-going teens (upper age limit is 18 years) to contribute to Free/Libre software projects. The Code-in starts on 2010-Nov-22, so do read up on all the organization's task lists and encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to participate!

UPDATE: Carol had posted a longer mail to a private list, which is more informative than my two-line post :)

We’re pleased to announce the Google Code-in contest starting this 22-November-2010 and ending on 10-January-2011. This contest is modelled on the success of our pilot program, the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, that was run in 2007-08. We will again be giving 13-18 year old students around the world an opportunity to get involved with open source projects by doing tasks ranging from documentation to outreach to hands-on coding. We're hoping to get lots of women involved in this effort, so we're hoping you'll spread the word about it, or participate yourself if you are eligible.

The participating open source projects that will be serving as mentoring organizations have been chosen from past participants in Google Summer of Code for their commitment to working with younger students as well as their overall mentoring skills. The 20 organizations - twice as many as were in our pilot program - are listed on our site at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/program/accepted_orgs/google/gci2010.

The participants have a chance to earn prizes including cash and teeshirts, with 10 grand prize winners receiving a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California for an awards ceremony. Grand Prize contest winners will be announced on 14, February, 2011.

We’re looking forward to a fun contest this year and hope you’ll consider participating yourself if you are eligible or spread the word to friends, family, and colleagues about the program.

We encourage you to join the Google Code-in contest discussion list: http://groups.google.com/group/gci-discuss and announcement list:
http://groups.google.com/group/gci-announce.

Please see our blog post: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-code-in-schools-out-codes-in.html for further details and feel free to contact me directly if you have specific questions that aren’t answered on the website: http://code.google.com/gci.

Cheers,
Carol Smith

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2010 October 9 [Saturday]

Openhatch IRC meet

By SVAKSHA on 2010 October 9 [Saturday], 13:37:00

On the Ubuntu-Women list we get a number of women introducing themselves, listing their coding skills, wanting to contribute, etc.. Right now we simply re-direct them to the specific communities within Ubuntu -- to find a project to contribute they have to use keywords to search Launchpad.net for bugs.... search for "perl" / "python" packages, or search for a specific project of choice and squash the bugs listed there -- this does not seem like a terribly efficient way to track participation or contribute, besides being confusing and/or intimidating for someone who is new to the community and is completely un-aware of how floss communities work.

Before anyone says IRC, I should chime in that the infrastructure issues (power outages, poor bandwidth, poor tech support, etc...) in India make it that much harder to contribute. This is not true for other nations with superior basic (power, water, roads, etc..) infrastructure.

So how do we know if a contributor actually searches and finds what she wants to work on or is even comfortable working with? Does she leave because the information she came looking for was not available and/or was simply intimidated by the sheer size and vast technical scope within Ubuntu? These are unanswered questions which I have wondered about -- not knowing if we managed to retain a contributor is a grey area.

Existing members are volunteers themselves with responsibilities, making it harder to track if we are losing technical contributions because we dont know what happens after the initial guidance to a query on the list. I'd been wondering how we could narrow the scope and find technical areas where UW can collaborate with other Ubuntu teams needing help.

In essence that is the usecase: Suppose a woman lists "C/C++ and networking" or "python and AI" as her skillsets, how could we scrape information from LP and use it to channelize women to specific bugs that need squashing --the difficulty level, its upstream/downstream, etc... Could we use an API for data-mining LP for possible areas of interest and list these on our wiki-pages, or post mails to the mailing list or push them into an RSS/Atom news feed on planet.ubuntu-women.org, enabling interested folks to subscribe to the news feed.

After that I pinged Asheesh of openhatch which does something similar -- tags all the floss bug trackers for open bugs, small bite-sized bugs and the big ones too. The idea sounded interestin to him and he called for a meetup -- The meetup is on Monday, Oct11 at 9am IST on #openhatch (logged) on irc.freenode.net and its just meant to bounce off ideas iirc.

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PyDojo-20101008

By SVAKSHA on 2010 October 9 [Saturday], 10:35:00

As per the schedule, we had the first dojo meet at CIS yesterday. Met Satish Kumar while searching for the CIS office and a helpful biker who cursed google-maps actually guided us there as we were both relying on the wrong geo-location plots on Google-maps (openstreetmap someone?)...as if the city's whimsical penchant for one-way roads was not irritating enough. There is an interesting anecdote --the biker who guided us there took us to the exact building and i asked him how he knew the place when 'CIS' didnt strike a memory chord. He promptly replied that there was a foreigner (he used the term 'white') who worked at CIS whom he has seen around town. Ah! There is something about finding your way around Indian roads, something to be said about the human touch that google-maps or other tech gadgets cannot compete with.

The CIS staff were very helpful and Royson immediately arranged refreshments and we both started off discussing what the dojo was all about -- many dojo participants around the world were nice enough to have a discussion on how they did things, what worked and didnt -- so it being the first day we had time to discuss how to structure it or not to have a structure at all, etc... In the middle of this discussion NigelB and Akshay Gandhi walked in and the discussion veered to the RHCE course he had joined. Later Nigel showed us the git graph he was working on. We had a longish discussion on git, bug trackers, communities and it was 8.45pm when we left, but not before planning to meet next week to work on nltk at 7pm same place. Join us!

I'm was multi-tasking --listening to a IE9 product pitch for html5/css3, while typing this entry, so any errors and missing information can be attributed to the much tortured greycells. </excuse>

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