I am in the middle of my mentoring work at Google Code-In program. GCI is a google sponsored program aimed at encouraging pre-university students to contribute to open source projects. One of these projects is the Sugar OLPC program.
In all fairness I haven’t been as involved as the program as I would have liked to. However GCI was a program that I really wanted to participate.
I was able to volunteer as a mentor and also talk about the tasks the project might bring up to the Google program. Help came from Chris Leonard and Walter Bender for many of the research and documentation program.
My first task there was an issue with a candidate that didn’t quite complete the relation between the guide description and his work. We decided to just ask the user for re-sumbision, the student didn’t come back and instead a new user claim the task which did sumbit a competent guide for the task at hand. That made my first task get succesfully closed.
Another candidate from India claim my other task about updating a lenghty manual for Sugar. After a few hours he had a more fresher look of the manual and was able to have it solved and available with new screeshots and more updated information.
It has been a great satisfaction so far to be involved in this mentoring project and hope I can do this again for the elder version, Google Summer of Code, for University students.
You can see the work these kids did here:
- Sugar FLOSS Manual – ZIP – by Kshitij Kumar
- How to create a collection – Doc – by C Wong
- SVG Internationalization – In process – Kshitij Kumar
- more to come..
Hope to get more people involved during the project.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 