2016 Email Announcements

This is an archive of all broadcast emails sent to Mentors and Org Admins.

January 16, 2017: Congrats on wrapping up GCI - time to choose winners and finalists

TO: Mentors and Org Admins

Google Code-in 2016 has officially come to a close for student submissions. Whew! You have all done an absolutely amazing job this year! Huge pat on the back to all of you!

Stats

You might have noticed our blog post a little while ago that shows the preliminary numbers for this year’s contest: 1,347 students from 62 countries completed 6,397 tasks this year! Those are insane numbers which goes to show how dedicated and awesome all of you are.

Tasks awaiting review

Right now there are about 26 tasks to be reviewed by mentors across 13 orgs. These tasks do need to reviewed before the deadline to review on Wednesday, January 18th at 17:00 UTC.

You can accept the task but if you plan to reject the task you’ll notice the ‘needs more work’ option is no longer available since they can’t submit any more work in the contest. So if you want to reject the task please just send us the link to the task you wish to reject so we know you have reviewed it and we won’t bug you as that Wednesday deadline approaches for not reviewing the task. : ) Then after 17:00 UTC Wednesday all tasks not accepted go into a rejected/incomplete state anyway.

Choosing Your Winners

Once your org has cleared out your final tasks to review you should start the process of determining your winners and finalists (if you haven’t already started those discussions).

As we mentioned before, after this Wednesday at 17:00 UTC the 10 students with the highest point totals for your org will be displayed in a drop down menu from the Org Admin’s Dashboard. From this drop down the Org Admin will indicate the 5 top students broken down in the following way:

• 2 Grand Prize winners
• 1 Backup Winner (in case another org chooses one of your Grand Prize winners or they are disqualified for some reason, etc.)
• 2 more Finalists

These 5 students will all be considered your Finalists and will all be receiving the GCI finalist hoodie and a special certificate designating them as a finalist for your org in GCI 2016. The 2 Grand Prize Winners will also be receiving the trip for themselves and a parent to Google headquarters this spring or summer for 4 days. FYI, we are doing two GCI trips this year, breaking the winners into two groups.

An org admin asked a great question today that we wanted to address with everyone. Many of you may end up in a situation where you have 3 (or even 4) excellent students and you are stumped on how to choose just 2 as winners. Please consider these factors as stated in the Contest Rules: Each entry will be judged according to the following factors: creativity, thoroughness, and quality of work. The Organization may additionally factor the contestant’s involvement in the Organization’s community in the judging.

Do not think about the fact that one student may be older than another so the younger one can win next year, that’s not the right way to think of this. The student’s age should have nothing to do with whether their work justifies them being named as a winner, just like their gender or the country they live in should have no bearing whatsoever either.

It would be unfair to say the 14 year old can try again next year because the 17 year old won’t be eligible. The 14 year old worked just as hard (probably harder as they likely had more to learn as the contest went on). So please look at the comprehensive body of work for each of the top 10 students and consider the creativity, thoroughness, quality of work and community involvement in your Organization. Thanks.

Announcing Winners and Finalists

We will announce the Grand Prize Winners publicly on Monday, January 30th at 17:00 UTC. Please do not announce your org’s winners or finalists (to them directly or on your own org channels) before the announcement is live on the Google Open Source blog January 30th at 17:00 UTC (9am PT).

We will be contacting Grand Prize Winners and Finalists around January 23rd as we need additional paperwork from the students and their parents before we can release their information publicly. So it is possible they may reach out to you directly to say thank you - we tell them not to post anything publicly which includes to the org’s mailing lists until after the Jan 30th announcement.

Important Dates

Wednesday, January 18th 17:00 UTC - Deadline for mentors to review student’s work

Monday, January 23rd 17:00 UTC - Deadline for organizations to choose their 2 Grand Prize Winners, their backup winner and the other 2 finalists. & Deadline for Mentors and Org Admins to update their shipping details

Monday, January 30th at 17:00 UTC - Winners and Finalists announced on g.co/gci and Google Open Source blog

Grand Prize Trip

We will again be inviting each organization to send 1 mentor to the Grand Prize trip to meet with the students. How you choose your mentor is up to you, many people choose the mentor who worked the most with the 2 winners, others ask the students to vote for who they want to attend. It could also end up being who can make it when we announce the scheduled dates for the trips this year.

We will have 2 separate GCI trips with 8 orgs represented on one trip and 9 on the other. We are still determining the exact dates but we hope to have those details in the next 3 weeks for everyone to start planning accordingly.

Thank you all again, please feel free to contact us at [e-mail] with any questions at all.

January 7, 2017: Thing to keep in mind for final days of GCI

TO: Mentors and Org Admins

We are in the final days of GCI 2016 with record numbers again this year, fantastic job everyone! This has been our largest GCI ever with 17 orgs, 449 mentors, and over 1125 students completing tasks (and that number continues to rise) -- we had a total of 980 students in 2015 for reference.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This has certainly been the smoothest GCI to date, and that is due in large part to all of you and your dedication to helping these students learn about your organizations and about open source - all during your holiday breaks and what is the busiest part of the year for many folks.

Higher student activity from now until the end of the contest

We have noticed that over the last few days there has been a 30% increase in the number of tasks being worked on by students as compared to the last 4 weeks so I suspect many of you are getting slammed right now. Unfortunately this is pretty normal as there is always a mad rush for those students who procrastinated and are trying to get their 3 tasks completed to earn the tshirt or those in the race for finalist and winner positions. This will likely continue until the deadline for task claims (next Friday).

A few reminders and important dates/deadlines to remember over the next couple of weeks.

Important Dates

Friday, January 13th 17:00 UTC - Deadline for students to claim their final task

Monday, January 16th 17:00 UTC - Deadline for students to submit their work. Note that you have to either approve the work or reject it, you can not send it back for more work after this deadline.

Wednesday, January 18th 17:00 UTC - Deadline for mentors to review student’s work

Monday, January 23rd 17:00 UTC - Deadline for organizations to choose their 2 Grand Prize Winners, their backup winner and the other 2 finalists.

Monday, January 30th - Winners announced on g.co/gci and Google Open Source blog

Choosing your Grand Prize Winners and Finalists

After Wednesday, January 18th at 17:00 UTC the 10 students with the highest point totals for your org will be displayed in a drop down menu from the Org Admin’s Dashboard. From this drop down the Org Admin will indicate the 5 top students broken down in the following way:

• 2 Grand Prize winners
• 1 Backup Winner (in case another org chooses one of your Grand Prize winners or they are disqualified for some reason, etc.)
• 2 more Finalists

These 5 students will all be considered your Finalists and will all be receiving the GCI finalist hoodie and a special certificate designating them as a finalist for your org in GCI 2016. The 2 Grand Prize Winners will also be receiving the trip for themselves and a parent to Google headquarters this spring or summer for 4 days. FYI, we are doing two GCI trips this year, breaking the winners into two groups.

Per the Google Code-in 2016 Contest Rules, orgs should choose their Grand Prize Winners and Finalists based on the comprehensive body of work the student completed in the contest period from November 28, 2016 to January 16, 2017. As stated in the Contest Rules: Each entry will be judged according to the following factors: creativity, thoroughness, and quality of work. The Organization may additionally factor the contestant’s involvement in the Organization’s community in the judging.

Students who have been Grand Prize Winners in the past are not eligible to be winners again. They can be named as Finalists however. You don’t need to investigate if the student was a previous winner, we will do a sanity check on that when you submit your final decision on your winners. If there is an issue we will contact the Org Admins so they are aware and we will move their backup winner into the Grand Prize Winner slot. We don’t expect this to happen as most of the previous grand prize winners decided to become mentors for orgs this year or they completed a handful of tasks to earn the tshirt.

Announcing Winners and Finalists

We will announce the Grand Prize Winners publicly on Monday, January 30th at 17:00 UTC. Please do not announce your org’s winners or finalists before the announcement is live on the Google Open Source blog January 30th at 17:00 UTC (9am PT).

We will be contacting Grand Prize Winners and Finalists around January 23rd as we need additional paperwork from the students and their parents before we can release their information publicly. So it is possible they may reach out to you directly to say thank you - we tell them not to post anything publicly which includes to the org’s mailing lists until after the Jan 30th announcement.

Mentor T-shirt size and shipping details

Mentors, if you have not filled in your t-shirt size and style please do so before January 23rd as we will be ordering and sending the shirts off to our shipping team to start packaging. Be sure to check your shipping address and make sure it is complete and please update if necessary. The shipments should start to ship from the US around February 15th to mentors and students and will take as long as 3-4 weeks to arrive to some locations. If you do not want a tshirt please just email us at [e-mail] and we will remove you from the list. Those mentors in Restricted Countries will not receive a tshirt as we can not ship goods to those countries, it doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate all of your hard work.

Call for blog posts

If you would like to write a blog post (or a mini-post) or even just a quote or two about your org's experience with GCI or some of the cool projects students worked on during the contest we would love to get it up on our OSPO blog in these next couple of months as we post more stats about the contest and announce the Grand Prize Winners on January 30th. Or if you have students who might have a good blog post or even just a great quote about GCI we would be happy to have those as well. Or maybe you have a mentor who was a previous student in GCI and they have a cool, inspiring story to tell. Please send all blog posts to [e-mail]

If you have any questions or concerns please let us know. As many of you know we like to send out a short survey at the end of each GCI to mentors and org admins asking about your experience with GCI as we look forward to hearing your suggestions on how to make GCI better and easier for mentors/org admins, etc. We will send the survey out about a week or two after the end of the contest. We read through all of the comments and try to incorporate your suggestions into the contest and into the webapp to make the next contest even better the next time around. And thank you all for your feedback on the webapp thus far, it has been very useful and will help us as we make some tweaks this summer for the next contest.

Congratulations everyone, only a week and a half to go before you can stop worrying about reviewing tasks for another 10+ months. : )

Again thank you all for the countless hours you have dedicated to help these hundreds of teens learn about open source development.

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us at [e-mail]

December 12, 2016: 2 week update

TO: Mentors and Org Admins

We are two weeks into GCI and hopefully things will start to slow down a bit for everyone. You’ll have some spikes again probably this weekend but we hope everyone is finding time for some much needed sleep.

You’ve all done an amazing job, this is definitely our smoothest GCI yet and we have about 46% more students than last year already completing tasks.

Stats

As of right now we have had 788 students from 60 countries complete at least one task (with 2 ambitious students completing over 20 tasks).

Bug fixes in current release

We did a release earlier today which fixed many bugs reported over the last couple of weeks. We're starting to shift development resources to finish work on Google Summer of Code 2017, so we will only be fixing significant bugs in Code-in. Please continue to report bugs and feature requests, as we are tracking and prioritizing them all.

Needs More Work button

Don't forget to click the NEEDS MORE WORK button when you tell a student that they need to fix something on their submission. We were concerned when we saw several tasks waiting for mentor review for over 70 hours. The target is less than 36 hours. When we looked deeper, we saw it was because the mentor didn’t click the NEEDS MORE WORK button.

You should also consider giving the student extra time if time is running out on the task. The default for extra time is set at 1 day but you can always add more.

Scheduling Mentors during holidays

As we approach the very busy holiday season many mentors and Org Admins will be traveling and unable to answer student questions. Please be sure you have notified your Org Admins if you will be unavailable so they can be sure to have other mentors ready to review student work for any of your tasks.

Our team will also be traveling over the holidays but we will be responding to emails within 24 hours as usual.

Keep up the great work everyone!

December 2, 2016: 4 day update

TO: Mentors and Org Admins

We’re 4 days into our biggest Google Code-in yet! Already we’ve had 409 students complete at least one task in the contest. Last year it took twice as long to get to the 400 student mark!

Congratulations to everyone for doing such a great job keeping up with students and their questions. We haven’t received a single complaint from a student about a mentor taking too long to review their work.

Student Work

We want to remind you that it is not a requirement that student work be uploaded to the contest site. An acceptable alternative is for links to the work to be included in task comments. They could be providing their work in your chosen source repository or binary hosting system. Ensure that work is accessible without additional access controls to someone who has the link.

Feel free to continue to use the built in upload functionality -- it is standard and simple. Two months after the end of the contest we clean everything out of the system, so if there is any work you want to save (and hopefully use) you must store it elsewhere.

Students must click “SUBMIT FOR REVIEW” in order for you to be able to review the work, even if the work is stored elsewhere.

API

Organization Administrators have access to an API that lets them view and modify task definitions and view individual task instance status They may find it useful for integrating into your workflows or reporting. OAs can find a link on their User Profile page.

Bug Reports

Thank you for the bug reports. This year, there have been fewer bugs and most have been minor and easy to fix. Please keep sending them.

If you are having a problem with the site or have a feature request for next year please email us at [e-mail] so that we can investigate. For bug reports screenshots are a huge help. Also include browser information, URLs, and clear reproduction steps.

All feature requests are considered and tracked, but we are unlikely to make significant changes in the middle of the program. Most features seem innocuous, until they have some unexpected impact and break three other things.

Conclusion

Thank you all and keep up the great work! And just a warning, you will likely have a lot of emails this weekend since it’s the first chance that many students will have to work on their tasks and register for the contest. But it will slow down in about another week or so - it shouldn’t stay at this pace the whole 7 weeks. :)

November 21, 2016: GCI Final Reminders before Contest begins Nov 28th

TO: Mentors and Org Admins

With less than a week to go before GCI 2016 starts for students, we wanted to go over a few things to prepare you for the busy weeks ahead.

1. Read the Roles and Responsibilities document

• There are always a lot of questions about what the expectations are for each role in the GCI and GSoC programs. Historically, organizations have developed their own, and this has resulted in wide variation from org to org. It became clear that a comprehensive set of expectations was needed. This documentation aims to standardize expectations across all participating organizations.
• Individual organizations may have additional roles and responsibilities. Talk to your Organization Administrator for more information.
• Special thanks to Sean, Valorie, Terri, Hong Phuc, and Mario for your help creating this document. Your insights have been invaluable!

2. Enter your tasks into the system now

• Org Admins: Be sure to have your minimum of 50 unique tasks (we strongly encourage you to have 75) entered into system before Monday, November 28th at 9am PT. Enter them ASAP so if there is a problem or any confusion we can help you fix it.
• Don't publish all your tasks at the start of the program. This way you can easily (and quickly) publish more over the next few weeks of the program as your initial load of tasks rapidly disappear.

Thursday, 11/24 - Sunday 11/27 are the Thanksgiving Holiday in the US. Google Admins will not be readily available if you have a problem. We will respond to emails but there will be a delay.

3. Catch up on all GCI Emails sent to Org Admins and Mentors

• Please see the email archive where you can revisit all of the emails that are sent to Mentors and Org Admins during GCI.
• Org Admins: tell any new Mentors that are added after today to view the email archive so they can read up on the information we have already shared.

4. Add More Mentors

• Right now 25% of orgs have less than 10 mentors. You definitely will want and need more than that to make it through the next 8 weeks. Remember, tasks can’t be published without an assigned mentor.

We hope you are all resting up before these next couple of months. Is everyone ready? :)

As always, please contact us at [e-mail] if you have any questions or concerns.

November 14, 2016: Updates and More Information

TO: Org Admins

We are less than 2 weeks from the start of GCI 2016! We know you are all very busy creating tasks and getting your community ready for GCI but please read this email carefully. It contains important information.

gci-mentors mailing list

All Org Admins and Mentors who opted in have been added to the gci-mentors mailing list. If you are not receiving emails, please contact us at [e-mail].

Many of you have already started using the mailing list to ask for, and offer, advice. This is especially useful for new organizations and mentors. We hope that you all continue to support each other throughout the contest!

Task API

Org Admins have access to the Task API which can be used to programmatically upload, modify and publish tasks. It also lets you see individual task instances. Org Admins can find more details on their User Profile page. There is also a sample script that implements CSV upload.

Students Plagiarizing/Cheating

This is a contest and these are teenagers so unfortunately that does mean it is likely some cheating and plagiarizing may occur. It is not the norm, but having just one student who cheats can be incredibly frustrating. Here is what to do:

• If you believe a student copied someone else's work or is cheating in some other way please contact us immediately at [e-mail].
  • Include as much information as you can as to why you suspect this is cheating. This should include a link to the task instance, as well as any other documentation, information or logs you have.
• We will review the information promptly. If we agree that it is cheating, we will freeze the student's account (preventing them from accessing the system and making them ineligible to receive any prizes). We will also email them to let them know why they have been removed from the program.
• Do not feel bad about reporting a student cheating or plagiarizing - it is not fair to the other 99% of students who are working hard in the contest.
• This is a valuable lesson the students need to learn. Our team has no problem banning a student for bad behavior and cheating, neither should you.

Bad Behavior

This is a more sensitive issue. These are teens and in many cases they don't realize how poorly they are coming across whether it is on IRC or otherwise.

• In most cases, we urge you to give the student the benefit of the doubt. Try to teach them the correct way to interact with other students and your community. They will often be thankful - many may not realize what they were doing was wrong.
• Threatening or harassing other participants (Students, Mentors, or Google representatives) is a violation of the Contest Rules. Please report cases promptly, and we will take swift action to remove the offender from the contest.

Expectations

Some questions have come up around the goals of GCI. Here is an excerpt from a longer email I wrote that you can find on the GCI-mentor list from 11/11/2016.

The objective of GCI has always been to give new, young students an introduction to open source (and hopefully get them hooked!). Many students do not have a clue what open source is and this program helps them learn, even if it is just the very basics. Every task a student completes is an accomplishment, regardless of the value it may or may not bring to a particular organization. Even the community's openness and their welcome to the student can change the student's perspective about open source and CS.

Most orgs realize there will be some contributions to their org that will be great, and many contributions that won't be all that useful to their org, but the reward is getting the student to learn something about the org or community or open source in general.

We realize GCI is a very time intensive and difficult program for participating organizations so we have been careful not to enforce strict restrictions on what constitutes an appropriate task. Each organization has their own view on what they want these students to learn as part of the Google Code-in experience. It is up to the organization to tailor their tasks to that goal.

Beginner tasks in the vast majority of cases will not be useful to the organization, they should be designed to help students new to your community become familiar with the community and the software. Many orgs choose to create beginner tasks around getting the environment installed on their computer, or maybe writing a blog post about the work the org does, etc.

In short, the GCI experience is what you and your org make it. There will be the students who are just trying to get as many tasks completed as possible (which irritates everyone, including us). But there will also be the lightbulb students who then go on and become mentors in GCI and/or GSoC and stay with your community helping to bring new perspectives into the open source.

Please let us know if you have questions about any of this information. You can always reach us at [e-mail].

November 7, 2016: GCI 2016: Important Info for Org Admins

TO: Org Admins

Congratulations on being selected as a Google Code-in 2016 mentor organization! Welcome to the new GCI organizations, we are excited to have you as a part of our GCI family! And welcome back to our veteran organizations, we’re thrilled to have you back with us!

You can start entering your tasks now on the site. If you upload your tasks now and hit publish, they will not be visible for the public until the contest starts Monday, November 28th at 17:00 UTC. Do not wait until the Sunday night before the contest starts to upload your tasks. We encourage you to upload some tasks as soon as possible to make sure they look the way you expect them to look.

Be sure that the link of sample tasks you sent as part of your application is not public on your page. We have a blog post going out today that links to the URL you put for your org and in a couple of cases the orgs might have also had their ideas list on that page.

Below is a quick summary of the main points to keep in mind as you prepare for GCI 2016. For a more comprehensive list of important details please read our Tips and Guidelines for Org Admins and FAQs.

• Mentors must be invited by OA’s using the mentor’s preferred Google account.
• Mentors can be as young as 13. A special Parental Consent form (Mentor Participant) is required and will be sent to any 13-17 year old prospective mentors when they first register with your org. OA’s must be 18 years or older.
• Consider having multiple instances for a task (ex: you can have 20 of the same task available for students to work on, rather than making copies of the same task over and over again. This is a good strategy for beginner tasks.)
• We strongly encourage you to have a minimum of 50 unique tasks and 100 task instances available on November 28th, the start of the contest. The more tasks you have in your queue at the start of the contest, the easier your life will be for the next 7 weeks!
• Be sure to have tasks in all 5 categories throughout the contest.
• You do not need to publish all of the tasks on the first day of the contest. We encourage you to publish more tasks every few days during the first few weeks of the contest when demand is particularly high.

Important Notes for your Org Profile page:

• Your Org Profile page is currently viewable by anyone coming to the contest site and is editable throughout the contest.
• Your Long Description is what the public will see - it should tell the students, parents, teachers, etc. what your org does in a clear, and concise way. This is the first, and often only thing, people will read about your org. Make sure it is interesting and gives students a quick understanding of what type of work your org does.

If you opted-in to the GCI-mentor email list, you should be receiving an invitation shortly to join the group. If you joined last year you are still on the list and do not need to rejoin.

Veteran GCI Mentors and Org Admins have a wealth of knowledge around best practices and are always ready to help! You can use the gci-mentors list to reach them. The archives are also full of useful information.

You may also wish to read the "GCI Organization Advice" document written by Mentors from RTEMS, BRL-CAD, Copyleft Games, and others as well as the Deterring and Detecting Cheating thread from a couple of years ago to help you prep your mentors.

If you have any questions or find any bugs please reach out to us at [e-mail].

We’re looking forward to the biggest and best Google Code-in yet!