Google Code In 2017 Lessons Learned

This is to document things that admins and mentors learned, for the benefit of future Code-In exercises.

OSGeo's Application document

• record initial tasks in a shared Google Doc and include a link to that document in the application; do not use a wiki, as those initial tasks have to be made private once OSGeo is accepted as a Code-in organization

Uploading Tasks

• recommend that teams upload a single task first, to check their syntax and csv formatting, before uploading multiple tasks in bulk

• external_url field has several undocumented rules:
  • 200 character limit length
  • only 1 url is allowed
  • no commas

Unknown Mentors

Be vigilant when receiving initial volunteers as mentors that are unknown, and request background on their OSGeo activity, and if they are new to the community, politely steer them to ways to contribute, and possibly join the contest next year. Sample reply to use:

Thank you a lot for being available as a GCI mentor! OSGeo mentors need to be able to guide students. Hence mentors need to be experienced OSGeo contributors and need to know the community and "how things work". Could you please share some information which specific OSGeo projects you have contributed to and worked on so far? How would you describe your areas of expertise within OSGeo? Are there any public OSGeo contributions you could link to (for example your OSGeo wiki page or your Github activity)? This would help us to get a better idea. Thank you! And if you have not contributed to OSGeo yet, we encourage you to start contributing to OSGeo by checking out http://www.osgeo.org/content/faq/how_can_i_help_osgeo.html ! Thank you!