We are excited to announce the 12 open source projects that will be acting as mentoring organizations for the Google Code-in 2014 contest that starts December 1st. The contest is designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to open source software development, giving them the opportunity to take the skills they have been learning in the classroom (or on their own) and apply them to a real software project. These open source projects have experienced mentors available — all have participated in Google Summer of Code in the past with many also participating in previous years of Google Code-in.
Before the contest begins, students should read up on the different mentoring organizations participating this year by clicking on the links below.
Apertium - a platform for making rule-based machine translation systems
BRL-CAD - a computer aided solid modeling system
Copyleft Games Group - promotes players’ rights to create, play, modify, and share games
Drupal - a content management platform
FOSSASIA - a non-profit organization supporting developers and makers of the Free and Open Source community in Asia
Haiku - an operating system, fast and simple, inspired by BeOS
KDE - a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix-like workstations
Mifos - a non-profit org that brings technology-enabled financial services to the poor
OpenMRS - a medical records system platform for developing countries
Sahana Software Foundation - humanitarian open source disaster management software
Sugar Labs - a learning platform that reinvents how computers are used for primary education
Wikimedia Foundation - MediaWiki and extensions, powering Wikipedia and thousands of collaborative websites
Organizations will provide a list of tasks for students to work on during the contest in the following categories: coding, documentation, user interface, quality assurance, outreach, research, and training. Each task has at least one mentor assigned to it to help students should they have questions.
The mentoring organizations are all busy working on identifying hundreds of tasks for students to chose from when the contest starts on December 1st. This year there are also beginner tasks available for students which are a great way for students to start working with the organizations and get a more complete understanding of the projects right away.
Starting on Monday, December 1st at 17:00 UTC, students that meet the eligibility requirements can register on the Google Code-in contest site and start claiming tasks and earning prizes.
For important contest information please check out the contest site for Contest Rules, Frequently Asked Questions and Important Dates. We have a screencast about the contest available to view on our program site where you can also find flyers and other helpful information including the new Getting Started Guide. You can also join our announcement and discussion lists to talk with other students, mentors and organization administrators about the contest.
Students, join in the fun – Google Code-in starts Monday, December 1st!
By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs
