Introducing people to the world of free and open source software (FOSS) has always been a priority for the openSUSE project. We’re not only doing so for new users with our distribution (did you get 12.1 yet?) or for new contributors with our project, we also frequently participate in programs like Googles Summer of Code or Code in. Those programs have introduced a lot of new contributors to both openSUSE and the FOSS community. So with pride we announce that, after a successful participation in Google Summer of Code this year, openSUSE will also participate in Google Code-in. Googles Code-in is a program aimed at pre-university students between the age of 13 and 17. It starts on the 21. November, 2011. For this program we provide a list of tasks that are both fun and challenging for the students. Students who work on these tasks get a designated mentor assigned who will guide and help them. The tasks students can pick vary from writing or re-factoring code to doing marketing for the project. Simply everything a FOSS project has to do. Students can of course select tasks according to their interests.

On completion of a task students get points and can earn prizes like t-shirts, cash and certificates of completion. The ten participants with the highest points earned by the end of the competition receive a grand prize trip to Google headquarters!

Doing your bit

For a successful Code In participation we all must do our bit. You can do two things:

0. Suggest tasks on our wiki page If you can think of a fun and challenging tasks for a pre-university student just go to the opensuse Code In wiki page and press the “Add task” button in the appropriate category. It’s as easy as checkers :-) If we find a someone willing to mentor the task it will be part of Code In.

1. Become a mentor on google melange and help students complete their tasks. If you want to help mentoring the students for the tasks they choose you have to sign up as mentor on google melange and tell me (Manu Gupta) about it so I can add you to our organization in that tool. Once you are a mentor you can pick/add the tasks you want to mentor.

Both bits are easy to do but have great impact on our own project and FOSS in general. Great benefit for low cost. Please think hard about joining our efforts!