 Thank you all for coming this morning. See, there's the y'all. That's the Texas part. I can't get rid of that no matter how long I learn California. I'm here today to talk to y'all about the Google Code-In program that we run, which is for 13 to 17-year-old pre-university students. Obviously, a few of you have been involved. You're wearing our Google Code-In shirt, same one I am. That means that you completed at least three tasks in the Google Code-In contest. So congratulations. Thank you all for being here today. And I'm also going to spend a few minutes at the end of the talk talking about the Google Summer Code program. Now, we don't have a lot of time today. So if you, at the end of this talk, if you want to come by and talk to me, I'll be around all day today and tomorrow. So feel free to come and talk to me or to Mary and Helen, my colleagues who came here from San Francisco, as well. So we're happy to answer any questions. All right, we'll try to leave it a couple minutes at the end for questions as well. All right, let's get started. So what is open source? Hopefully, well, I don't know. Maybe everybody here doesn't necessarily know the definition. What we really have been trying to do with this program, with the Google Code-In program, is to introduce students who might not be familiar with open source to the open source world. And this is kind of the great entry way for students to be able to do that. So it is a online global contest. We've had students from over 99, or from 99 countries participate in the contest over the last seven years. We just wrapped up the seventh year of the contest about a month and a half ago. And we look forward to having the eighth year of the contest later this winter. So basically November, December is usually when we start the contest again. Now what it is, is it is an introduction to software, open source software development. Students have the opportunity to work on a real open source software project. Now that's pretty rare. That's something that a lot of people don't really do until after they're out of college. So we realized with the success of our Google Summer Code program, which is for university students, that we really needed to be talking to an even younger crowd, and get students interested in open source when they were teenagers. And we're really excited about the success of this program and how it's really grown over the last few years. This past year was our largest program yet. Now students essentially work on smaller tasks that are created by these open source organizations, and they earn prizes for their work, because it is a contest. So I'm going to go through a lot of this relatively quickly. All the information is actually on our website. But there's a lot of information, and I just want to try to highlight this as we go along. Now the main thing about this contest is it's not just about coding. It is called Google Coden, but it's not just a coding contest. It's also to show students that you don't have to be a coder to be able to participate in open source software development. There's so many other skills that are needed for the success of any software project. So we have tasks that are coding in a variety of languages. We also have tasks that are documentation tasks, training tasks, so maybe it's making a video about some aspect of the software, or maybe it's a video telling people what FossAsia does. FossAsia is actually one of our organizations that participates in GCI, Google Coden, and GSOC, the Google Summer of Code program. Now that's kind of why I'm here today, I guess. Now we also have tasks that are user interface tasks. We have outreach tasks, so maybe it's just telling others about open source, or about the work that FossAsia or that Wikimedia does. And then also there are research tasks, and of course quality assurance, which can be finding bugs, fixing bugs, that kind of thing. We instituted this concept of a beginner task a couple of years ago, and it's been really helpful because we realized we would get a lot of students that were interested in the contest and would register, but then they would never actually go on to complete an actual task. And so we were trying to figure out, well, why was that? And we realized it was because they were a little intimidated. They thought, well, I don't know where to start, because there's thousands of tasks, or about usually anywhere from 2,500 to 4,000 tasks posted at a time. So that's a little overwhelming. I mean, there are filters and things that you can do to figure out, OK, I know Python, so I want to look for the Python tasks. Or maybe I want to look for the training tasks. But still, there's a lot to go through. So we created this idea of a beginner task. Students can complete up to two beginner tasks in the contest. They don't have to, but if they'd like to, they can. They can do a beginner task with org A. They can do a beginner task with org B. Or they can do two different beginner tasks with the same organization. Now, beginner tasks serve a couple of different purposes, including becoming familiar with the actual ins and outs of how the organization works. Most of these tasks are tasks that the organization created to help the student get integrated into their community and to help them understand how their community works. They aren't generally tasks that really, the organization that's really needed done for their organization, but they're things that they know will help the students and help them understand how they work. Now, the other thing about this is these tasks really help build your confidence. Because students go, OK, I'm going to try this task. I think I can do it. Maybe it's writing a blog post or something. Most people can write a blog post, and that's great. And so they go, OK, I can do this. This is good. And so then they kind of go, OK, what's the next thing? I can do something a little bit harder. And so that's kind of how we help build the student's confidence, because this is a seven-week contest. So it's not super long. It does usually take place over about the end of November to about mid-January, generally. We can shift it a week or so one way or another. But those are generally the dates of the contest. And so students have seven weeks. So the way that these tasks are designed, they're designed to take students about three to five hours to complete. Now, we realize you're still doing school. You need to sleep. You might have holidays, or you're traveling, et cetera. You have band practice, whatever. So we don't expect students to actually sit down for three or five hours straight working on one task. Some do, and some do that a lot. And that's great. But we realize the students might have an hour to put into the task today, an hour, two days from now, et cetera. And that's fine. So these tasks are designed with a minimum time limit, or time frame of three days up to about seven to 10 days. So if a student's working on a task, and they say, oh, I'm not quite done with this task, or something came up, I got sick, I couldn't finish it, all they have to do is ask the mentor to extend the time limit of the task. And the mentor's like, great, no problem. Because the key point of this program is the mentors want the students to succeed. Now, when I say mentors, people go, well, what do you mean by that? Each of these tasks has at least one, usually four to five, different mentors assigned to that task. So what that means is, if the student's working on a task, then they can ask the mentor for help. Like, say they're working on it, and they get stuck. They're like, ooh, what do I do at this point? Then the mentor can go in and say, OK, you're almost there. You just need to do this one additional thing, or try this. And so the mentors really are there to help guide the students, and to help them learn. All of these mentors are volunteers. They're not being paid to do this. They're doing this because they want to bring new students and new perspectives, essentially, into their open source communities. They realize how important it is to have new blood coming into their community, and to get new people excited about their programs. So of course, they're hoping that the students will stay involved in their community after the GCI program has concluded. Now, so I kind of briefly went over this sort of, but how it works, the organizations are chosen by Google. Last year, we had 17 different open source organizations that participated in the program. Like I said, FossAsia was one of them. We had BRL, CAD, Wikimedia, Sisters. We had quite a wide range of organizations. And the students go in and find a task that looks interesting to them. No one is sitting there saying, you have to do this task or you have to do this task. It's all about what is interesting to you. If you are looking for coding tasks, go and look for the coding tasks that are, if you know C++, go look for the C++ coding tasks. If you know Python, look for the Python. If you like making videos, go and look at the training tasks, or if you want to do documentation. Documentation is something that is often lacking in pretty much every software project, not just open source, but every software project in general. Documentation is a great way for the students to get involved in the community, because it helps them do a little bit of research, and they can understand a little bit more about how the organization works. And sometimes it's cleaning up docs. Maybe it's organizing a five page document into one page highlights. And that's key. That's something that's really helpful, because documentation is meant to help new contributors come into an open source community. So if you have documentation there telling people how to get started with your community, then they're like, OK, great. I mean, it's the same thing that we do for our programs to say, hey, here's a frequently asked questions section, or we have a student manual for our Google Summer Code program. It's all about making it easy for people to get started. So students can work on a task. They, again, spend about three to five hours. Sometimes it's less. It depends. On the first few, it might be longer. It might take you a little bit longer to do the first couple of tasks. But then you kind of get in a groove, and you're like, OK, I can do this. And you might be able to do the next task in two hours. So it really depends on your skill set. But nobody, I mean, honestly, the mentors don't care if it takes you three hours or 12 hours to do. They just want you to do it right. And they want to help you. Again, they want to help you learn. So along the way, you submit your work. The mentor will review it. If it looks good, mentor says, wonderful, great. And then you can go claim another task. Or if you don't want to claim another task, you don't have to. And you can be done with the contest. That's fine. Or you can come back three weeks later in the contest period and claim another task. Totally up to you. And if the work is not quite what the mentor wanted, then they will ask you for more work. And they'll say, OK, you need to do this instead. Or you didn't quite flesh out this one particular part. Please finish this. So they send it back for needs more work. And you'll do the work and resubmit it. So why would students want to participate? And this also goes to why would teachers want to have their students participate or tell their students about this program? The number one thing would be it's giving you an opportunity to work with a real software project. Again, that's really unusual. Most teenagers don't have that opportunity. Or if they do, it's because they're really go-getters and they're like, OK, this is great. I'm going to go and I'm just going to start contributing to this open source project on my own. But a lot of students are a little scared. They're like, well, I don't know. Why would anybody want to listen to my opinion? Why would my ideas matter? Well, with this program, your ideas do matter. The mentors and the organizations are there to help you understand that, yes, your ideas do matter. You have good ideas. Keep them coming, right? That's one of the cool things about open source. And this program is that a lot of these organizations have been around for a very long time. And they've had a lot of the same contributors. They need new people. They need your new ideas. Excuse me. And so also you learn a bunch of new skills. You learn version control, which is something that a lot of people don't learn until after college even. You learn how to create patches. You learn distributed development. So working with people from all around the world. Because the mentor that you're working with could be in San Francisco. They could be in Berlin. They could be in Brazil. So you never know where your mentor is. But it's really cool to understand that you're working with a global community. All of these organizations have mentors from all around the world. And of course, it's an easy entry. You can just register as long as you're 13 to 17 years old. And in a free university program, you can register. And if you want to participate, great. If you decide this is not for me, maybe I'll try next year, that's fine too. No one's making you do this. And we also wanted people to understand, again, open source is not just about coding. It's about so many different things. It's about being a part of a community. It's about being a self-starter too. That's something that we notice a lot with this program and our university program. People have a lot of questions. And questions are great. But people expect you to read the documentation. People aren't going to kind of handhold you the entire time. But as long as you read the documentation and then ask your question, say, hey, I read this. I don't see the answer to my question. And they're like, oh great, you read it. You took the time and the kind of the energy to research a little bit more about our project. And then you earn a lot more respect. Because they're like, OK, cool. They actually really care. And they're trying. Oh, yeah. And one of the cool things, we've had a lot of students go on to become committers to these open source projects. And to be a committer when you're about 15 or 16 years old, it's a pretty cool thing to be able to say that you accomplished. So briefly, if you do one task, you get a digital certificate, three tasks, you get a t-shirt, which is why a whole bunch of folks back there from here in Singapore are wearing their Google code and t-shirts. And then there are five finalists chosen by each of the organizations. Those finalists receive a hoodie. They get their name on the blog. They get a special finalist certificate. And then two of those five finalists from each organization are grand prize winners. And they receive a trip to Google, to the San Francisco and Mountain View offices for four days. They get to bring a parent, do segue rides. They get to meet Google engineers, talk about open source stuff in general. They get to meet one of their mentors. We fly out one of the mentors from each organization. So they get to meet the mentor in person, which is a really, really fun part of my job to watch the interactions of the students together. Because you have students from the Ukraine to Costa Rica to Germany to Singapore who might never meet in any other circumstance. But to see them all together and to have them interact is great. So go through that. These are some quick stats. We had 704 of our 1,380 students this year. We're from Asia. So that's huge. Obviously, so more than half. 208 were from Singapore. I see some smiles back there. Yes, y'all can take a picture of that slide. That's a good slide. 185 are from Dunman High, which as you know, we've had a lot of the volunteers that you'll see around here today, or this weekend, at Foss Asia from Dunman High. Thank you all for helping out. And this is the fourth year in a row that Dunman High has had the most students from any given school in the program. And this year we actually have our first winner from Singapore. So that's really cool. I don't know if that person happens to be here today. Please come up and introduce yourself in person. But that would be cool because I'll see you on the Grand Prize trip, obviously. But if I could meet you this weekend, that would be nice. And we also have two finalists from Singapore. And Foss Asia has been a huge part of this program. And they've really helped get word out in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and obviously Singapore as well. So we love Foss Asia. The mentors are great. There are 65 mentors from all around the world participating this year from Foss Asia. These are some stats from this past program that show where we had the students from Asia. I'm not sure why New Zealand's on there. Oh, it's doing an APAC. Sorry. That's why. Wrong slide, kind of. But anyway, we had a lot more people from Indonesia this year, and Vietnam. Vietnam numbers rose significantly. So we're really excited to be getting more people, more students from Asia. And a big part of this is word of mouth. We need you to tell other students about it and to tell the teachers you know about the Google Code-In program, because that's really kind of how we get word out about this program. There's no way to send one mass email to every school in the world. That would be interesting if there were. But I bet I get a lot of spam from that. But anyway, the best way is to really just tell other students about this. How do you prepare? G.co slash GCI. We have stickers up here that have the URL on there. So it's just G.co slash GCI for Google Code-In. That has all the information on there that you could need. Again, we haven't announced the 2017 program yet, but it will happen. It will happen in not sure the days, but generally November or December is when we start it. So keep that in mind. You've got some time to let other people know about it. But just keep checking back on our G.co slash GCI site. All right, I've got about five minutes. Is that right? OK, cool. I've got about five minutes. So here's our picture of last year's winners. All happy and smiling at the Mountain View office. That was in June. We usually try to do the trip in June, because June in California is a wonderful, wonderful time of year, if I do say so myself. All right, you got the picture? All right, I'm going to briefly go over what is GSOC. And again, I'm going to be around all weekend, so please come up and ask me questions if you have any questions about GSOC. GSOC is Google Summer Code. It's for university students. Essentially, you work on one large coding project for three months. You work on it from basically the end of May to the end of August. You earn a stipend. Stipends are based on the country where you live. Here in Singapore, it's $4,200 US dollars if you successfully complete the program. And just like GCI, this is designed to bring new contributors into open source. So you also are gaining, again, that real world experience that you can't really get any other, well, you can if you're being very proactive and asking an organization, hey, I just want to start contributing. But this program really gives students a great way to get started into open source. It helps organizations identify new developers. It helps you students build a strong network so that when they're applying for jobs, because they've been working with mentors, they're working with other students, they're making a lot of contacts around the world that really can help them with kind of on their resumes, they can also help write recommendation letters, but they can just help give them contacts to others in the CS world. So it kind of works the same way except this year, we have 201 mentoring organizations that students can choose from. This is our largest program ever for Google Summer of Code. We've been running this, this is now the 13th year. We have 201 organizations, and we'll be accepting more students this year than we ever have before as well. Last year, we accepted over 1,200, we'll be accepting more than that this year. So this is a great year to get started in Google Summer of Code if you are a university student or no university student that might be interested. And you ultimately submit proposals to these mentoring organizations. The proposals are based on the project ideas. Each of these 201 organizations has a projects, or an ideas list. You go through, look for something that looks interesting to you, and you write a proposal based on it. Now, the cool thing about the timing of this particular conference is that student applications for Google Summer of Code open on Monday. So it's from Monday, and then it goes on, so which is Monday the, what, 20th? And goes for two weeks until April 3rd. I'm gonna skip through all this. Here's the timeline. This can all be found on our website, g.co slash gsoc. See a theme here. So we do have stickers up here that have the URL on there as well, and we have flyers that have to talk about GSOC. And on the back, there's a whole list of advice, kind of like this is a step-by-step thing you should do. So if you're interested, check that out. That's something that actually one of our colleagues wrote up this year, and it really is a great step-by-step process. If you just read that one piece of paper, that will really help you out. Blah, blah. Okay, so we've had over 12,000 students participate in GSOC, and this year, we're looking forward to expanding from our 104 countries, and that's a lot, but I've gotta get at least 105. Gotta have some kind of even-ish number. So I'm gonna wrap it up there. Oh, we've had over 30 million lines of code through GSOC. That's also kind of a cool number to throw out there. But I'm gonna leave it up. I think I have time for one question, it looks like. Okay, yeah. So, oh. I have a question for our coding. Sure. Do you need to be affiliated with a school university or can you be a homeschooler and also participate? Good question. So if you didn't hear what he said, he asked, do you have to be involved in a, you know, like they affiliate with a school or can you be a homeschooled student to participate in Google Code-In? You can be a homeschooled student, yes. You again, just need to be between 13 and 17 years old, but we do actually have quite a few homeschooled students that participate. Okay, that was quick. Any more questions? I can probably take another one or two. No? No? Okay, so I went through that really quickly, but like I said, I'll be here all weekend. I'm Stephanie, for those of you that walked in late. I'm happy to talk to you about Google Code-In or Google Summer of Code. So I'll be wearing some kind of Google t-shirt all weekend so I'm sure you can find me. But feel free to come up and ask me any questions. All right, thank you. Thank you.