Google Code-in and openSUSE

After Google Summer Of Code 2011, openSUSE plans to participate in Google Code-in. It is an excellent opportunity for openSUSE to meet young talents and introduce them to the ways of open source.

What is Google Code-in?
It is a contest hosted by Google for pre university students every year  where they are encouraged to participate in open source projects and are awarded cash prizes for their contributions from Google. Various open source organizations participate in it and mentors from every organizations help these students to get up to speed and advice them on how to complete the challenge. The contest period is from November 21st to January 16th 2012

What are tasks?
Every open source organization has a lot of cool ideas in mind and likewise every member of the community has some ideas in his minds. These ideas are collated and put together and are categorized into three levels of difficulty – Easy, Medium and Difficult. Students are rewarded points as to what task they complete.

Deciding the tasks
The mentors decide the task, off -course community can suggest but at the end of the day it is the mentor’s discretion on what task they want to work on. Tasks can be anything and for a more accurate description of the tasks  visit here.
Note that not all tasks will be code related, so even a non-technical guy with enough experience with other skills can participate in Google Code-in as mentors. Tasks can range from Documentation to translation, artwork to marketing and off course what is a code-in without code related tasks like code refracting, testing, finding and squashing bugs and a lot more things.

Preps for Code-in
openSUSE has already started preparations vigorously and is already coming up with a list of tasks and is looking for mentors. While lots of us have already signed, we are looking for lots more to sign up as mentors and see more interesting tasks ahead.
More information can be found at en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GCI
and http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GCI_Tasks

Along with the above 2 links, make sure to have a look at http://google-melange.com/

Thanks to Jos for reminding the links do not work