<div dir="ltr"> 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 <a href="http://irc.freenode.net">irc.freenode.net</a> 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: <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/help/responsibilities">https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/help/responsibilities</a> * 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] <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/sugar-devel">lists.sugarlabs.org/sugar-devel</a> [1] <a href="https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#Getting_set_up_on_IRC">https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#Getting_set_up_on_IRC</a> [2] <a href="https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019">https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019</a> [3] <a href="https://codein.withgoogle.com/">https://codein.withgoogle.com/</a> [4] <a href="https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#This_is_a_stub_for_25.2B_example_tasks_new_for_GCI_2019">https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2019#This_is_a_stub_for_25.2B_example_tasks_new_for_GCI_2019</a>. [5] <a href="https://codein.withgoogle.com/dashboard/">https://codein.withgoogle.com/dashboard/</a> [6] <a href="https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md">https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/src/contributing.md</a><div> </div>-- <div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Walter Bender Sugar Labs</div><div><a href="http://www.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">http://www.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://www.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank"></a> </div></div></div></div>