[IAEP] GCI background

[Walter Bender]

As I mentioned in my earlier email, Sugar Labs has been selected to
participate in Google Code-in (GCI) 2019. It is a really fun program and
represents a great opportunity for the community to reach out to new
contributors.

The contest begins on December 2, 2019, so we have about one month to
prepare.

For those of you who are volunteering to be a mentors, I will be sending
out invitations to formally sign up as mentors over the next few days, so
keep an eye out for the invitation. Meanwhile, I wanted to share some
general information with you and the Sugar Labs community.

* The GCI admins are myself, Lionel, and Ibiam.

* We will be using the sugar-devel mailing list [0] for all of our general
GCI correspondence. This ensures that any discussions are public and that
the entire community can participate. By “general”, I mean discussions
about process, time lines, etc.

* We will be using #sugar on irc.freenode.net as our help line for the GCI
students. It is important that we keep as close to 24/7 coverage as
possible, as we anticipate participation from students from almost every
timezone. If you do not have an IRC account, please see [1] for details.

* The GCI website maintains a mechanism for corresponding with the students
regarding individual tasks. That thread is only accessible to students and
mentors. It is meant for private feedback to the student.

* We maintain a wiki page for Sugar-Labs-specific GCI information [2].

* Further details about the rules, guidelines for mentorship, etc. can be
found on the GCI website [3]. Mentor-specific guidelines are here:
https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/help/responsibilities

* It is important to remember that we are working with youths, ages 13-17,
many of whom are participating in order to learn. So please be appropriate
in your language and please be patient. Also, we need to be protective of
their privacy, so do not share or solicit any personal information.

About tasks:

At the heart of GCI are the tasks. These are bite size (and not so bite
size) challenges for the students. Each task can take from 3-7 days and
they can span a variety of areas:

Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and
helping others learn more

Outreach/Research: Tasks related to community management,
outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions

Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high
quality

Design: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design
and interaction

More details on what these categories mean is available on the GCI website.

It is our responsibility as a participating organization to come up with
the task list. We need to have around 100 tasks defined before the content
begins and will need at least 300 to keep pace as the contest progresses.
Open issues generally make good tasks. More suggestions can be found in the
wiki [4]. (Music Blocks alone we have more than 200, so I don’t anticipate
running short.) Mentors can enter task suggestions directly into the GCI
system [5]. For everyone else, feel free to share on the sugar-devel list.

Suggests for tasks can come from any mentor or community member but the
approval of tasks is done only by an administrator.

All tasks should be written with the same clarity one would expect in a
ticket: a detailed description of the challenge and suggestions as to
resources that might be of use. You can include links in a task
description, to an issue, for example, but the task description should be
largely self-explanatory.

We adhere to the same standards and processes of contributions for GCI
tasks as any other contribution, so please familiarize yourself with the
Contributor’s Guide [6].

Before the contest begins, I will send out more details about reviewing and
approving student work. It is imperative that we maintain consistent and
high standards for all submissions.

Finally, as I said at the start, GCI is fun. Enjoy.

regards.


-walter

----


[0] lists.sugarlabs.org/sugar-devel

[1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#Getting_set_up_on_IRC

[2] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019

[3] https://codein.withgoogle.com/

[4]
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#This_is_a_stub_for_25.2B_example_tasks_new_for_GCI_2019
.

[5] https://codein.withgoogle.com/dashboard/

[6] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
<http://www.sugarlabs.org>
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