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Announcing Google Code-In

Google Code-InGoogle Code-In (GCI) is an amazing program in which junior high and high school students are encouraged to participate in an exciting open source project, like Drupal!

Open source projects participating in GCI create a list of short-term, high-impact tasks for students to work on.

The last time this project ran (called GHOP) we had a number of new, talented individuals come in to Drupal who are still active community members today. Past GHOP rockstars include Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7), Jimmy Berry (boombatower) and Daniel Wehner (dereine).

Unlike Google Summer of Code, this work is *not* just about code! Tasks can be around any of the following categeories:

  • Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
  • Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
  • Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
  • Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
  • Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
  • Translation: Tasks related to localization
  • User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

The GCI contest lasts from November 22 - January 10 and is open for students age 13-18 (read full eligibility requirements). Students will recieve a small compensation for each task that is completed. Are you eligible, or do you know someone who is and can participate? Are you a participant in our community who can envision and mentor tasks for students to work on? Read on to find out how you can help!

How do you participate as a student?

Have you always thought that open source was fun, and wanted to learn more about programming, design, usability, and more, and want to participate in a huge, diverse, distributed community of knowledgeable and friendly people? If so, welcome to the Drupal community! :)

  1. Sign up at Google's Melange site (you will need a gmail account), and also on the Google Code-In group.
  2. Take a look at the rules and the Frequently Asked Questions.
  3. Choose a task that you are interested in and claim it. (exact procedure is described in the FAQs). Each task will have an associated link to Drupal.org where you can interact with your mentor and community members on your task.
  4. If you need help (or just want to chat), you can find other students and mentors on IRC in the #drupal-gci channel on irc.freenode.net. (Setting up IRC). Mentors can also be reached via e-mail.
  5. For the payment process, you will need to verify your identity with Google -- more information can be found at (FAQ)

How do you participate as a mentor?

Are you a contributed module or theme developer, member of the marketing team, documentation team member, or on the internationalization team? Have things on your todo list that for some reason never quite get done, but are nevertheless quite important to the project? Then we need YOUR help coming up with fun, interesting Drupal tasks for students to work on over the next couple of months!

  1. Join #drupal-gci on irc.freenode.net to help answer questions from students and other mentors.
  2. Begin by suggesting a task in the Google Code-In issue queue. It's fine if the actual issue you want students to work on already exists elsewhere in the queue, but we need a "meta" task (pointing to the other issue) in order to put it into Google's system.
  3. Write it up according to the task guidelines and template, and mark it "needs review". It will probably get kicked back and forth a couple of times to make it more clear and approachable to students.
  4. Once accepted by one of the Drupal GCI admins, it will be moved into Google's tracker as an official task.
  5. To register as the official mentor for said task, sign up at Google Melange and click Apply to become a Mentor. You will need a gmail account, and make sure to check the gmail account for confirmation on your request, after which you'll have to fill out a form and accept a terms of service.

Every Google Code-In task has an assigned mentor, this mentor has to guide the student and also create tasks that challange them. Mentoring is an rewarding experience, where you are able to work with passionate, talented students who you can teach but probally also learn a lot from :)

I have other questions. Who can help?

Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7) and Daniel Wehner (dereine) are Drupal's Google Code-In organizers, and are reachable either on IRC or through their contact forms. There are also folks in #drupal-gci and #drupal-contribute on IRC who can help.

Welcome to the Drupal community / Thank you for mentoring! :D