Google seeks open source mentors for Summer of Code
March 3, 2008
Google’s gearing up for its High School student open source project Summer of Code, and they’re seeking organisations to act as mentors, or hosts, for the students who are participating. Basically it’s a chance for open source projects to open up their doors to some new, young enthusiasts, many of whom will be working on open source projects for the first time.
The deadline for organisations to apply is SOON – March 12 – so if you’re interested in helping some bright young people help *your* project, then check it out. 
GHOP winners announced – but where are the girls?
February 12, 2008
Google’s Highly Open Participation competition for pre-university students is a great thing – it’s encouraging them to get into tech, and specifically to get into open source tech. They deliberately designed it to allow many, many different ways of contributing, not just hard coding. It was set up to encourage the competitors to actively communicate and participate with the open source communities on the projects they were working on – in the hopes that they’d stay on as contributors to those projects once the competition ended. For all these reasons it’s a great scheme.
But I was so disappointed to see yesterday, when the 10 grand prize winners were announced, that there was not one girl amongst them. This is difficult to express because I don’t at all want to detract from the boys who won.
I bet that Google is as disappointed about this as I am – they are aware that creating diverse computing projects capable of catering to an entire planet of users needs a diverse community behind it. And if we wish to attract the best and brightest to computing, we need to figure out why we’re attracting so few women.
I suspect and hope that Google will be looking at the GHOP competition and program mechanics, the community projects they worked with, and the way GHOP was promoted to see if they can spot any reasons why girls were under-represented in the top 10. Perhaps, too, they’ll release the full stats on participation and we’ll find that there was a sizable representation of girls, but that the 10 best contributors happened to be the boys who won. This at least would indicate that the program is getting girls involved.
In the meantime, I’ve ordered a copy of She’s Such a Geek, to remind myself that women are everywhere in tech. And I hope that next year we’ll see a few happy geek girls on the Googleplex tour after winning GHOP.
Gina Trapani on ‘Crowdsourcing a better Gmail’
February 3, 2008
Gina Trapani is well known for her work as the Editor of Lifehacker US – I met her when I became the Editor of the Australian version, Lifehacker AU.
Lifehacker publishes tech tips, tricks and hacks – and is known for favouring FOSS apps over paid ones. It also features apps written by the Lifehacker team itself. Probably the best known of these apps is Better Gmail – a Firefox extension rooted in the Greasemonkey code base, which aggregates a number of Gmail-related user scripts into a single interface.
Gina recently gave a talk at the Web Directions North conference in Canada in which she told the very cool story of how Better Gmail came into being. She called it “Crowdsourcing a better Gmail“. In Gina’s words: “Suddenly I found myself leading a distributed software project that involved dozens of developers without even intending to! ”
She’s kindly made the transcript of her talk available through Lifehacker, and I highly recommend you read it for an insight into how an idea to use Greasemonkey to create a Firefox extension turned into a “crowdsourced” open source development project which involved liaising with developers across the world – including Google itself. The app ended up translated into over 20 different languages, thanks to the efforts of FOSS volunteers worldwide. Incidentally, the talk also makes the point that APIs are so important – kudos to Google for releasing a GMail API suitable for use with Greasemonkey to encourage open source development with its product.
Congratulations to Gina, and thank you for sharing this very interesting insight into open source community development and community management!