 Good morning everyone, thank you for coming. I have the honor today to ask a question to these beautiful ladies. And I also encourage you to ask your questions as well. Or we're gonna have a very interesting discussion on my favorite topic, how to sustain communities and the deadline today. Building sustainable open tech community for coding programs, contests and hackathons. So, how sustainable is it to build, to make communities strong for these programs? How does it work for our panelists? Everything we will discuss after a short introduction of everyone here. Please meet Stephanie Taylor, everyone knows. I think Stephanie is a program manager at Google working at the open source program office. As she works on outreach team managing the Google code in. We have many students from this program today. For pre-university students and helping the team with the Google Summer of Code program. Please welcome Stephanie. Also, Damini Saitse, you already saw the first day. Very interesting introduction to the conference. But Damini was very active at open source community for Sasia. Contributing, mentoring, fostering community. Amazing work, thank you for doing it. Please welcome Damini. And next, you're in two. Thank you for coming, director of women who code Singapore network. And nonprofit global organization with a set of programs for engineers to help build the careers we want. Expert, programmer and CEO, highly qualified software engineer with proven skills across all avenues of software development. Please welcome Yuli. And last, oops, we're dead here. Here we go. Too many big names. It's also dead, I think. It doesn't have a battery. Yeah, it can use this. Okay. And last but not least, home food Dam. Originally from Vietnam. She is the founder of West Asia, the open source organization from Asia with the goal to bring together a global community to develop open tech solution for a better future. Please welcome. So let's start. The big question for the panel today, how sustainable is it to grow community for coding programs, contests and hackathons? So we all know all these famous programs like Google Summer of Code, Code Heat, Google Code In, October 1st, 24 PRs, and other programs. Do they achieve the goal of advancing open tech projects? I want to start the discussion with everyone to introduce your work programs and what they are currently running, what your programs are involved in. Please, Stephanie, maybe you'll take a picture. Okay, testing time, thank you. So I lead at the Google Summer Code and Google Code In programs. Google Code In is for younger students, so it's for 13 to 17 year old pre-university students. And it's such a contest, it's a seven week contest and it's all online, it's all international. And the key to it is that when students are completing tasks, they have mentors that are assigned to those tasks that are there to help guide the students. So if the student has a question, they can ask the mentor, hey I'm stuck, how do I move forward? And then what's really fun to watch is when the students actually go on to help other students, right? Which is really the whole point of the community. And then we have Google Summer Code, which is for university students where they spend their summer break, three months coding on an open source project, also all online. So these are all remote projects. They're not going into a physical space and meeting with the mentor. So that's kind of an interesting aspect of it as well. So a lot of things obviously happen once it's in person. So it's kind of a different perspective. And so right now, I'm sorry, it's what we're working on. So right now, always working on both programs actually, but right now the students are applying for Google Summer Code this week. So applications in Tuesday night, midnight here in Singapore. So that's kind of cool. So it's our last chance. Yes, yeah, last chance, exactly, exactly. And how many students do you have? So normally for GSOC, last year we accepted over 1,300, we'll accept a little bit more than that this year. For GCI, we had rendered numbers and had 3,555 students that completed tasks in the 2017 program, which was a 265% increase from the previous year. So to say it's growing would be another statement, I think. Yes, and already we're seeing the numbers for GSOC people are registering right now. So those numbers are already higher. So the interest is definitely there, the awareness is there, and so much of it's word of mouth. It's other people telling, hey, I was a student, it was so cool, you should be a student, or hey, I was a mentor, you should be a mentor. So it really is all about people working together and collaborating. And the mini is a great example of being a student and then mentor. Yes. Would you share your experience? Definitely. So I started off my open source journey in 2013 as a student. So I've been continuously applying for GSOC. Finally, I got selected in 2016 as a student with POS-Asia to work with a project called Low Glac. And since then, I continued my open source journey with POS-Asia. And for a year long, I was a student, always tried to contribute as much as I can. And then I got a chance to be a mentor where I kind of mentor all the new comers to the project as well as contribute to the code base as well. And it was an interesting journey because you have to look it into different perspectives. So once I was a student and I look up to my mentor for help, and a mentor looked down to a student in a different perspective saying, okay, you have to do some prerequisite work and then come up to the mentor and then ask. So as a student, I didn't realize that. I used to always go ask for every single silly doubt, but my mentor was very, very, you know, my mentor was Michael. He was very patient enough when he used to answer each and everything. But when I became a mentor, it's very difficult to manage your work, full-time work, and then mentor students. So I learned a lot and it's very, very difficult to, you know, be a mentor, and that's what I realized. And it was an awesome journey. Maybe further in next, I'll be sharing more about it. Thank you. And maybe a woman who called. Yeah, sure. So, yes, we started a human who code in Singapore last year, January of 2017. And we will always have a global nonprofit organization and our mission is to make sure that women are well represented in the tech industry, in all levels of the tech industry. And in Singapore, what we do is that we organize events and technical talks, workshops, and we encourage the women to step up and basically be speakers, as well as hold a talk, hold a workshop and such. So yeah, it's pretty good. And yeah, so because I started this in Singapore because I noticed there is a lack of such groups. And when I was looking for who I can't find any of us, okay, then we need to start one in Singapore because I need a way to be able to connect with other women professionals, which is why I do this. And I think it's very, very important. It's pretty work for hercotons because sometimes it's a bit scary for young participants to apply. And once you meet other people and talk and you see that other people did, so you can do it as well, right? So it's helping, right? Yes, definitely. So before we started our meet-up group, so I attended quite a few meet-up events at that point. There's no lack of meet-up events in Singapore. There's plenty. But I went to one meet-up event, which is an open space where more than 60 participants there were two other girls beside me. And that's quite intimidating, you know, for any lady to basically just join in group with just huge testosterone event venue. And so one of the ladies, she was really brave, she just went around and just talked with everybody. But another girl, she came over to me and said, oh, it's okay, I follow you for the rest of the day. I said, yeah, that's the thing is that you feel intimidated. So we try to provide such a space such that you get to build up your confidence before you head out to try other events. And the same work programs continue with mentors when you're not alone, you can follow someone for the technical process of open source project. Homebook, you have a huge experience on hackathons and different events. I don't have a huge experience. I can share a little bit about what we do in false Asia, but not huge, but we are very implicit. So our ultimate goal is to bring an open source education. So we want open source to be taught in school and university around Asia. And what can we do to achieve this goal? So we are very happy to be part of G-SOLC and also GCI for the past, I think over five years already. And every year we get more students and we also got more mentors and we learn so much throughout the program. And at one point we just feel that, okay, so we want more, we want G-SOLC, GCI throughout the year, not only a sample program or only a seven-week program for students. So you know that when students get on the program, after the program finished, we don't see them anymore. So they are busy with school, busy with other activities. So the question is how do we keep students continuously engaged in the open source community? What are the ways that we figure out we should do it to organize more programs? So to keep the students engaging also continue their work with the community. And we, so after G-SOLC, every year we run a content, not really a content called one-way program called Code Heat. So basically in Code Heat, the student or young developers from everywhere around Asia can participate in this program by check out the project, different projects on K-HUB on the fourth Asia, that it depends on the programming language that they are interested in, so there are a lot of repositories and also different issue that they can start code and try out their first step to contribute to the open source, different open source projects. And a little bit similar to Code Heat, we also have a mentor that moderate and help the student if they have any questions, but everything happened on G-HUB, on issue checker. So whenever you, in order to participate in the program, you need at first need to have a G-HUB account and then you look at different projects that you like and go there and select from the beginning to a difficult task, whatever question you have, you can comment on the task and the mentor will reply to you directly on an issue. So if you want to take the student how to work like in a development company so that they're ready for the job market in the future as well, beside Code Heat, we also collaborate with many university in the region. So we also organize events and workshops inside university, especially in India. So we have a lot of mentors, including Dhamini, ex-student, Google, some of course students now become mentors and they open, go out and organize all activities and promote open source inside a university which is really, really cool. And on our side, the Bible for Asia, the team also go to other conferences, talk about our work and introduce you to student and your developer open source. Okay, hackathon, right? We organize site and hack event in hackathons, the incorporation with NGO like the UNESCO or the GIZ. The organization, they also want to explore the potential of open source, how it can help the development organization and we also work with them on a number of hackathons throughout the year. You're touching a very important question. How do we keep students stay in open source in general or maybe on the same project? And because it's an incentive program and the students can attempt for many different reasons. So I wonder, maybe you have some statistic, Stephanie, or ideas, how many students stay? How many, can students come back and what are the reasons why they participate? So it varies. So we'll start with Google code and so that's again the program for the younger students. We have a lot of students that if they become a winner, they can only be a winner once. So they still want to, they're excited, they might have completed 50 tasks or whatever in the Kugiria's contest. Yeah, that does happen. And I think we had one do 80 some not this year. But anyway, most of the students do about 20 to 40. I think most of the people who end up being winners. But they want to stay involved. This is so cool, it's just fun. I really enjoy working with these people and then they think, well, it was a really cool experience for me. My mentors were amazing. I don't want to be a mentor. So we've seen so many of these students become mentors over the last three or four years. I think three years ago we opened it up, went through all the legal rigmarole and now we can have mentors that are under 18. So the students, if they're 13 to 17, they can be a mentor and GCI. They still get invited by the organization, but obviously the organization has worked with them in the past and they work like cross-agent. And they go, oh, you're great. Sure, it'd be great for you to work with other students. And that's really cool because again, they were a student the previous year and so they have that perspective to be able to say, I know what it feels like to come in new to this. And most of the time there's really, we don't have a great statistic on it. I am starting to get more and more statistics on this, but one of the things that we ask about is, is this your first experience with open source? And we're just, we just started asking that back to the question this year. So we will start accumulating those stats and be able to see more about it. But my feeling is that for GCI in particular, probably I'd say at least 80% either didn't know what open source was at all, or certainly had never contributed to it, probably even 90% honestly had never contributed to it. And so GCI gives an opportunity and a lot of them always tell us, well, I didn't have any idea how to start it. Why would somebody care about 14 years old? Why would some open source project with these people around the world? Why would they care about my idea and about how I think this could be better or this feature or my pull requests? And so the cool thing about GSOC and GCI is all of the organizations want these students, they're there to help these students, they're there to guide them. And so they, which may not necessarily be the case for all open source organizations because it does take a lot of patience and a lot of answering questions, particularly for GCI students, which is great, but you have to have the right people, you have to have the right mentors and that goes with any kind of a program. Not everybody should be a mentor. Some people are better at doing administrative stuff but they're not as good at dealing with the individual day to day part of working with students. Maybe they're good at reviewing the work but actually answering questions. Not everybody is, that's their thing and that's fine, right? Again, there's so many different ways to contribute to open source as well as being mentors or work admins. And I think I just went around the question. The other part is GSOC. So GSOC, we are seeing, I feel like we've seen more and more students become mentors. Meaning, and when they do that, they're even more likely to continue to stay involved in open source. We have a lot of students who may go on and do something else and then come back a couple of years later because maybe their last two years of university are just crazy busy and they just don't have time. But they remember the experience they had and they really enjoyed working with whichever community and they go back and start doing some more cool requests. Like, hey, I'm back, I've got some time. Or I was talking to a gentleman another day at our GSOC meetup and it was really cool because he said, you know, I was a student and I applied to be a student in 2010. I didn't get accepted, this is a GSOC student. I didn't get accepted, I applied the next year and I got accepted. He said, but after that first year, he's like, I really submitted a really bad proposal and they pretty much told me that, right? But they could tell that I was interested and I was excited about the project. So they stayed talking to me and encouraging me and so he kept learning and kept pushing himself and then was accepted the next year as a student and then it's been a mentor since. So since a mentor since 2012 and now he's on the board of that particular organization. So yeah, so that's actually honestly not a rare occurrence but I hear things like that these days. So it's fun because we hear about all parts of the world, you know, but how getting involved in GSOC and finding people, like being a part of a community, I think is so important for making people want to stay involved in open source. Thank you. Yeah, just to add on, if you have something. No, I can't talk about it. Yeah, just to add on, the way we work with operators is obviously slightly different because we don't have many students in our events but we do have a social coding event and we did that once a week last year and this year it was once a month where we just get together and work on all the source projects and I always encourage the members who turn up, they see, focus on what are their interests rather than their language, which is very different and also we don't actually have a very straight mentor and he's fine because we are all professionals anyway so we just pretty much learn from each other which is slightly different and of course we have a set group where people just pose questions and whoever knows the answer basically can answer which is slightly different and the number of people who recurrently come back are of course very few in ratio but definitely they are and these are the ones that really keep the projects going because they are passionate about the topic and they keep learning all these, you know, by the time they start most of them don't actually know the language or anything like that, they are interested in projects but as they go along, they learn more about the language and interested to learn more and that keeps them going. I totally agree with Julie and also with Stephanie so how do you keep people? First of all, you need to allow them to work on something that they know and the second thing, keep them responsibility the same of support and responsibility is really important to keep people engaged. Another thing is recognition so keep them recognition, appreciation for their work and something else that I learned by working with the post-Asia community and also our developer build a personal relationship so normally we try to have a personal connection with our core developers so we try to find out what are their interests where they come from, their family that they're setting to understand more the level of engagement so one, why this one, they really have a lot of full revised contributions also the other ones are a little bit less so we want to understand the environment they're setting around them and to tackle these so it's really important first to let them do what they like transfer responsibility and ownership recognition, appreciation and build a personal relationship with your core contributors and developers because if you have a good relationship with the core people the core people will help you to get more new people on board. This is so true You think that I can use your research Stephanie, do you have something? Sorry, I have one more thing I'm sorry, I'm sorry because you both brought a very valid point about finding projects you're most passionate about we get that asked we get asked that all the time okay there's 212 organizations to stay in GSOP this year how do I choose? and we say we can't choose that for you you need to find something that you want to do because there's nothing more awful than working on a project that you care nothing about for three months find something that you care about and then or something that you might that at least is interesting that you're like, oh this sounds kind of cool I don't really know much about this but it sounds like it might be cool and then maybe you do the project and you're like, oh okay maybe it's not so cool but hopefully you do the project and you go, oh this really is fun and then you keep going down that path so I think it's the passion for a particular project or type of project really is key as well as obviously the community This is very good comment and I was wondering maybe you could share your experience how did you find something you like and how, who helped you on that way? Yeah So I will just try to discriminate how a student thinks and how a working professional thinks So as a student I had awareness of how to build my own project on my local system but I'm not aware how to make some real-time project which actually works everywhere where users can use anywhere on any device I'm not aware of that So I got a chance to work on a project for low-clack So they, I have come to know that okay, this is how you have to fix the bugs make sure they're responsive or also get to know that there's something called CICD I was not aware of that when I was doing my own personal project Okay, there's something which my core have to go through some test cases have to pass and this core have to get successfully deployed So I have to make sure that what I write is I have to be more responsible when I work with the community So all that my perspective towards building up things have changed totally and that kind of helped me to grow and once I started working I got used to that environment Okay, first I have to do my homework So though you work as a full-time you'll be assigned a mentor at a company where mentor is not responsible for giving the entire he or she is not gonna write code for you, obviously they will be just guiding you So you have to be ready to learn on your own and give, learn how to unblock yourself and ask the right set of questions so that you get unblocked by your own So I have learned that and also I would like to talk about two other coding programs Hacktoberfest and 24PS How many of you are aware of these two? Very, very few So far we are talking about programs for students but they are these two unique programs for people There's no age restriction and also your global location This is open for everyone So the aim of these programs are to actually encourage individuals to start get started, get contribute to open source So I would like to share a small example My mom is a teacher and she quit her job two years back to pursue her PhD and she wanted to build her own website and she kind of asked me to write code for her own website and she started using WordPress for that but I kind of gave her some awareness and told her that, okay, there is this Hacktoberfest going on in October you can maybe try contributing to that and also 24PS is a coding program which happens in December and it's open for everyone as well It's the same like Hacktoberfest where you have to send out 24 pull requests in the month of December So what I have seen is all these communities though they are multiple coding programs it's the responsibility of the community to be welcoming to the newcomers, be it anything So they will be people who are coming from non-coding background and they'll be students who are curious enough always come up with more and more questions but very little knowledge on the actual code base So you have to be patient enough and the community should be welcoming and also take care of all these programs happening in the right way So these are like two different perspectives how a community should encourage and a program to take it forward and a student how he should be obviously a mentor is so helpful to a student the student will be no giving back to the community so that kind of perspective should be carried on Thank you very much And maybe we have some questions from the audience Thank you, ma'am Oh, okay How will you... I work in Elasticsearch So being in the open source company we were doing so many open source related programs This year we got accepted to GSOC and it was quite interesting we got a lot of proposals but we feel bad for turning out many of those proposals and because students were pretty interested to do a lot of work in open source So is there a way that GSOC can be pursued? can be asked after GSOC, you can come back and definitely work in Elasticsearch Yeah Actually a lot of the organizations do that and a lot of the students do that They don't have to be a part of GSOC to contribute I mean, ever, right? Because anybody can contribute to open source So a lot of times people will have again, maybe they get five students' slots and they have like 10 excellent students and they tell the other five students that they can't accept they say, we would love just for you to stay involved in our program and keep contributing and of course, sometimes people will keep contributing and then they apply again the next year if they're eligible Sometimes maybe those students aren't going to be eligible because this is their last year at university Some organizations have actually started their own kind of like mini GSOC or have found ways to fund them somewhat It may not be the same amount that the students are getting for GSOC but still to give them something so that they can focus on encoding for the summer That's becoming more and more common and because we do get the organizations some stipends, some organizations use a little bit of that money towards that Can we use this data like whatever students send their proposal and they, of course, it's not fitting in that type of frame We want to make these slots because there are five, six proposals to join the group Can we ask the other students and drop email later does Google have to do that? Sorry, I'm sorry, the last part asking them what? Asking them to apply again or something like that Apply again like next year? Not for GSOC, we can drop in and then ask them to again contribute like engaged by Primara You can always, you're already, hopefully you're already talking to them Hopefully they're already communicating with them, you and then once the students are announced you can just, I would say immediately as soon as soon as students are announced immediately contact those three or four that you couldn't accept and say we really want to just like you we just didn't get enough slots this year we really want you to be involved with the community we hope you'll stay right now Everyone wants to go to all any other questions? The other students I think you call your students so what's the wind of the resource what or open source and I want to know the wind of the information what's it all about? I'm sorry, what's the what was the question exactly? What's the wind of the open source? What's meaning of open source? I can't even I can't even I can't even really good question now yes, it's actually what we want to do to tell people what is open source okay, very simple example do you know WikiVidia? Do you use WikiVidia? Yes Okay, so this is an example of open source so something that people can freely contribute can freely edit and can freely copy and share to everyone so the WikiVidia if you think many people around the world but do you know that WikiVidia you don't buy a software called WikiVidia so the software itself is also an open source software so an open source project open source software actually you have the freedom to copy, to edit and to share with everyone that you like so and you're on open so not only about like free to use for the for easy so do you use Microsoft? what operating system do you use? Minecraft? I don't think so You don't think so? No problem No problem so open source that's how the people make this software before the community in open source project the people don't get hired to work on the thing on the project so they they contributed based on their passion and their interest so everyone is welcome so you don't need to be hired to work for a software company for instance today that means you mentioned about a law firm project if you're curious to learn about the project you can just go online and see what can you have and in order to build a software project not only about writing code there's so many things that are normal contributors can can help for instance documentation localization UX so how to make the application look good so then many things that you can do and in open source the project on community they open for everyone so to contribute and about what is GSOC? Stephanie probably you missed the earlier session she also asked about the meaning of GSOC the meaning of GSOC okay you want me to take that one? okay the quick version of that is GSOC is Google Summer of Code and it's a program for university students they spend three months coding on an open source project under the guidance of a mentor and they are the same that's a short version thank you my friend yeah what are you asking for? hi I'm also I'm also from the IT college weather I was going to ask like what what will happen to you like if you're dealing with those those programmers which like just want to try out programs like those who are not really that good like and little to no experience you want to give us updates? we get lots of them and welcome seriously I would say seriously welcome it's really more about your interest in the project itself rather than your level of code so to speak if you're interested in the project just contribute that's how you learn any language actually we don't actually learn language by having a teacher or a mentor tell us or what to learn next about the language you know we learn about the language by knowing and learning how to code a particular thing and if you're interested in the project you want that project to succeed to do better to work better you learn more about the language and that's how you learn how to learn any program language so you have asked like I don't write code that often but how can I just contribute to a bigger project right? so for you to get started maybe you can just join one of the one of their communication chat or IRC channel and introduce yourself and you know kind of say that okay I'm a new new joiner and I'm really new to this code base can I get some help? ask out for help and I'm sure you will be getting some people you know helping you out and then you can create a full request or you know send out a small patch to the code base saying okay this is what I have written and they will be a review process by the mentors or the maintainers and they will be you know they'll try to correct your code review it properly so that you know in the process you keep on learning more and more on it and you make your pull request more beautiful and then it finally gets most to the code base and that's the biggest achievement so for sure your first pull request will take a lot of time but I'm sure that you will learn a lot a lot about the code base from it but for people who haven't heard about open source before we have a very detailed documentation on the POS-HR blog it's called then okay so how do I first contribute to open source project and it is an article written by our developers for non-coder and also for technical people I just want to share a little bit like how I even I did not study programming yet but how I learned Python so I also do the code academy where I show you different ways how to learn code but actually it's only when I figure out that I have a problem that I want to solve that problem so I think seven years ago I want to generate a VDA5 from a lot of images so if I have a clear problem it's easier to learn programming then just to go into two languages that you want to learn so think about the problem that you want to solve us and then try to Google that you read online what are the potential solutions that you can do to solve that problem or if you have a project already in mind there are so many people to ask and maybe find partners to live together so it's the best place to do so don't be shy talk to people and ask questions about what is open source and how I can be part of it great question so I think we have two minutes left and last question what else do we need to keep healthy and growing communities? what is your takeaway on this simple question which is not easy to answer so anyone want? yeah definitely I would say just three of you yeah and just yeah the thing is that people do go away but they come back also so as long as the project is still open you'll have people come in and out and that's right come to the organization sometimes it happens every year and then you can meet the right people convince your friends convince the new contributors and can start new projects so come to us it happens every year in Singapore in March and we also have a very active Github channel if you have any question go to Github for Asia the community, we have you so I think it's always about bringing new people in that's what's going to keep the project healthy and there are various ways of doing that I mentioned in my talk earlier Google's Mercote has been a good way for some of these small and medium sized projects to get more visibility because a lot of projects are very localized so maybe everybody that's a contributor is in South Hollow or Toronto or Berlin but they don't know how to get word out about their project across the world so things like Google's Mercote other programs where there's a lot of different open source projects available for people to like people go to our website and say oh there's 212 projects and they can read up on all of those they can also look at last year's projects because we have different projects each year some projects like Falsatia have been contributing for five or six years some for 12 or 14 but others will be in GSOC for one year but then the next year it's a different we have to accept somebody else but we're always accepting new organizations like the Sherry accepted 31 new projects into GSOC so that's giving those new projects more visibility so more people now know what they do against these are very small projects and maybe five or six core contributors so I see myself in you guys six years back so maybe I can help you out to create your first pull request or your first comment today itself see that's how we got connected and that's how the community works and I also wanted to add from my personal experience that I see that programs like Google Summer of Code inspired many different programs as well where you don't need to contribute core you can start as a non-code contributor and it's an easy way to become a member of the community and it can be any expertise you have the design, translation, documentation and maybe it's even second step the first step is to become a user and to get to know people who built this software and ask them what how can I help so this was my takeaway from what I saw following up the Google Summer of Code and other programs do we have more time for questions or what's it's 14.42 yeah so I want to finish discussion and say thank you everyone but if we have questions from the audience I think we can continue with the follow-up in the discussion thank you, I'll just comment actually thank you for the panel I think it's also an honour to be able to host this course this year in this institute my name is Tak Swan, I'm kind of looking after this building but I also look after the lifelong learning council's LearnSIP Fund which is really a funding scheme that encourages individuals who want to facilitate them for learning opportunities I thought maybe it's useful as a resource for mentors who think that they can form their own community maybe collaborating with Google or whoever wants to sustain the learning journey by applying this funding to support me as part of the government intention is to promote lifelong learning so I think this is a very great initiative that all you are in and I think we actually have young students to learn something, to learn the skill and I know this is really important so if anyone wants to find out more, you can talk to me thank you I think the Life Learning Institute is such a great name this will definitely follow us, we need to learn all life any comments or questions? don't be shy okay, good, then I think we can continue offstage I know the video recording if you have some personal questions to our panel members it's your chance to ask thank you very much for coming