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FOSTERING PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN OSGEO THROUGH
THE GOOGLE CODE-IN COMPETITION
V. Rautenbach a,*, M. Di Leo b, V. Andreo c, L. Delucchi d, H. Kudrnovsky e, J. McKenna e, S. Acosta y Lara f
a Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, South
Africa - victoria.rautenbach@up.ac.za
b European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy - margherita.di-leo@ec.europa.eu
c ITC - Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, The Netherlands -
veronica.andreo@utwente.nl
d Edmund Mach Foundation, Research and Innovation Centre, Italy - luca.delucchi@fmach.it
e OSGeo - h.kudrnovsky@gmail.com and jmckenna@osgeo.org
f Comunidad gvSIG Uruguay - sergio.acostaylara@mtop.gub.uy
Commission IV, WG IV/4
KEY WORDS: Education, Outreach, Pre-university students, Open Source
ABSTRACT:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation’s (OSGeo) vision is to empower everyone, from pre-university students to professionals, with
open source geospatial applications, tools and resources. In 2017, OSGeo decided to participate for the first time in the Code-in
competition. Google Code-in (GCI) is an annual online competition aimed at introducing pre-university students (13-17 years) to open
source projects, development and communities, through short 3-5 hour tasks. This is a unique opportunity to interact with pre-university
students and to encourage them to become part of OSGeo. In this paper, we present OSGeo’s involvement in GCI with the purpose of
establishing lessons learned to improve our approach in the next editions of GCI. Over the 51 days of the competition, 279 students
completed 649 OSGeo tasks. Students consistently communicated with the mentors to discuss submission and receive inputs from the
wide community of developers too. During the GCI, the mentors reviewed the students’ work and provided suggestions and feedback.
Generally, the submissions were good and some of them are now part of the projects. As this was our first time participating in GCI
these issues are seen as lessons learned and strategies to improve the process will be implemented based on the mentors’ experience.
It is key to encourage these students to continue contributing to the OSGeo community, as they will bring new energy and ideas into
the organisation; for many of these young students, this competition is a way to introduce them to the geospatial industry.
1. INTRODUCTION
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) was founded
as a non-profit organization in 2006 and the number of open
source software projects under its umbrella is steadily growing;
the term ‘open source’ applies to software that is both freely
distributed, and its source code is shared. The current OSGeo
projects include content management systems, desktop
applications, geospatial libraries, metadata catalogues, spatial
databases, and web mapping. OSGeo’s vision is to empower
everyone, from pre-university students to professionals, with
open source geospatial applications, tools and resources (OSGeo
2017). To further OSGeo’s commitment to open education, the
GeoForAll initiative was established in 2011 through a
partnership between OSGeo and the International Cartographic
Association (ICA). The importance of educational outreach and
open source for the larger geospatial community was emphasized
when the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote
Sensing (ISPRS), International Geographical Union (IGU),
Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe
(AGILE), and the University Consortium for Geographic
Information Science (UCGIS) joined this memorandum of
understanding. At present, GeoForAll consists of 124 labs,
mainly based at universities and research center world-wide.
Even though there are various outreach activities at the university
level, and not only through OSGeo, the majority of open source
developers are between 30-49 years (Choi and Pruett 2015). This
suggests that more effort is required to engage with the younger
(below 29) geospatial community and encourage their active
participation.
Google has two programmes to introduce pre-university and
university students to open source, namely Google Code-in
(GCI) and Google Summer of Code (GSoC), respectively. GSoC
was first established by Google in 2005 and has grown ever since.
GSoC is an online, international program targeted to university
students, that aims at fostering their participation in open source
software communities. Mentoring organizations select students
that will be developing software applications during 12 weeks
and receiving support and feedback from mentors within the
software community. Successful students are paid stipends by
Google. The program aims at identifying and bringing new
developers into open source software communities, as well as
exposing students to real world software development. OSGeo is
a veteran organization having participated in GSoC and having
graduated 180 (at 2017) students from all over the world every
year since 2007.
In 2017, OSGeo decided to participate in Google Code-in (GCI)
for the first time. GCI is an annual online competition aimed at
* Corresponding author
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This contribution has been peer-reviewed.
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W8-175-2018 | © Authors 2018. CC BY 4.0 License.
175
introducing pre-university students (13-17 years) to open source
projects, development and communities, through short 3-5 hour
tasks. As opposed to GSoC, in GCI students are not selected by
the organizations, but freely pick up tasks from one or more
mentoring organizations and complete them. Students qualify for
different prizes (i.e. certificate, t-shirts, hoodies and the grand
prize of visiting Google’s main headquarters in San Francisco)
depending on the number of tasks they complete. During GCI,
participating organizations have a unique opportunity to interact
with pre-university students and to encourage them to become
part of their respective organizations. Thus, OSGeo’s ultimate
goal is to encourage and inspire the students to become actively
involved in OSGeo after the GCI contest has ended.
In this paper, we report on our experience participating in the
2017 GCI contest and the lessons learned to improve our
approach in the next editions of GCI. The remainder of the paper
is structured as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of how
GCI is structured; in Section 3 we briefly discuss the method
followed; an overview of the OSGeo’s involvement in GCI and
report on the experiences of the mentors is presented in Section
4; and lastly in Section 5 the overall results and observations are
discussed, and conclusions are provided.
2. GOOGLE CODE-IN
Google Code-in (GCI) is an online, international competition
aimed at introducing pre-university students (13-17 years) to
open source software development (Google 2017) and
communities. For most of the students, GCI is their first
experience with open source and thus, the competition follows a
strict structure to gently introduce them to the open source world.
The GCI competition generally runs over a period of seven weeks
around the beginning of the calendar year. Once Google
announces the program every year, organisations apply to
participate in GCI and if selected, they need to create numerous
tasks. The tasks should take approximately 3-5 hours to complete
and they can represent different levels of experience and
difficulty (i.e. from beginner to advanced). The task description
also includes the mentor(s) responsible, the type of task (i.e.
coding, documentation, training, outreach, research, quality
assurance and user interface), links to relevant information,
maximum amount of time the task can take to be completed (e.g.
3 to 7 days) and the number of instances available. The number
of instances available for each task represents the number of
times a certain task can be claimed by students. For their nature,
some of the tasks can only have 1 instance (for example, a bug
fix, once it is fixed, doesn’t require another student working on
it), whereas some other tasks can entail multiple instances (for
example, designing a t-shirt for a code sprint event). Students can
then select tasks from the organization’s list, however, they can
only claim and work on one task at a time. Only when the task
has been approved by the mentor or abandoned, the student can
claim another task.
Once a task is submitted for review, the mentor(s) review the
work submitted and can either approve it or request more work,
providing comments to improve the submission. Mentors have
36 hours to review a submitted task, but they are encouraged to
provide feedback to students within 12 hours, because a delay in
providing feedback can impair the student’s performance in the
competition. Students win prizes based on the number of tasks
completed and the quality of their submissions. The prizes range
from a digital certificate or t-shirt to a grand prize trip to Google
headquarters in California, United States of America (USA).
Overall, the 2017 edition of GCI had 3,555 participating students
from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks with a record of 25
open source participating organizations (Google 2018). This was
a record number of students and it represented a 265% increase
in participation as compared to 2016. Unsurprisingly, almost half
(47.8%) of the students are from India and a quarter (25.4%) from
the USA. The southern hemisphere is under represented,
probably due to GCI taking place during the summer vacation in
most of these countries.
For 91% of the students, the 2017 edition was their first time
competing in GCI. However, disappointingly only 17% of
participants were girls. On average, most of the students were
between 15-17 years old. Two thirds of the students completed
three or more tasks and they earned a t-shirt. Refer to Section 4
for details on OSGeo’s participation in GCI.
3. METHOD
In this paper, we present OSGeo’s involvement in GCI with the
purpose of establishing lessons learned to improve our approach
in the next editions of GCI. To achieve this, we analysed the
student submissions and collected feedback from the mentors.
Once the competition finished, we downloaded the data from all
OSGeo tasks. These datasets include tasks designed and offered
by the organization and instances of those tasks that had some
activity (i.e., claimed, completed, abandoned). Each instance
contains information, such as date the task was claimed,
interactions among student and mentor, submissions, and date
task was approved. Basic descriptive statistics (e.g., percentage
of tasks completed, abandoned or out of time, answer time by
students and mentors, days to complete different type of tasks,
number of tasks completed per student, number of tasks per
project, number of tasks with which mentors interacted) were
estimated from the instances data and plotted. The script used for
this aim is available at:
https://git.osgeo.org/gitea/lucadelu/gci_analyst.
The OSGeo administrators and mentors were invited to
participate in a short feedback survey to collect information on:
percentage of material integrated into the various projects, the
number of hours spent mentoring, if any students are still actively
participating in the community, and whether they would consider
mentoring in the next GCI edition. Additionally, all the co-
authors of the paper served as either an administrator or mentor
during the 2017 GCI edition. Thus, all co-authors shared their
thoughts and experience, and this was summarised in Section 4.2.
4. OSGEO’S EXPERIENCE DURING GCI
4.1. Overview of OSGeo’s participation in GCI
During GCI 2017, OSGeo’s team entailed 20 members from the
OSGeo community (i.e., 4 admins - acting also as mentors in
some cases - and 16 mentors) that created 176 tasks for
GeoForAll & OSGeo, and involved 11 software projects (i.e.,
FOSS4G, GeoServer, GeoTools, GRASS GIS, gvSIG,
MapServer, OpenLayers, OSGeoLive, pgRouting, PostGIS, and
QGIS). Students consistently communicated through the GCI
dashboard, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and mailing lists with the
mentors to discuss submission and receive inputs from the wide
community of developers too.
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
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176
Figure 1. Overview of countries of origin of OSGeo students
Based on the data extracted from the GCI dashboard, 542
students selected an OSGeo task. The majority of the students
were from India (49%) followed by the United States (24%),
Poland (7%), Singapore (4%) and 18 other countries (refer to
Figure 1). The distribution is based on a sample of the students
that completed a task requiring them to add themselves to the
OSGeo member map that 170 students completed. It should be
noted that an Italian student participated in the GCI, even though
Italian students were not allowed to enter. The reason for this is
not known to the authors.
In total, the students completed 649 tasks (this includes multiple
instances of the same task) but 207 tasks were abandoned, and an
additional 106 tasks ran out-of-time. Most of the students
completed only one task, while the two grand prize winners for
OSGeo ended up with 72 and 44 completed tasks respectively
across different projects (refer to Figure 2). In general, students
mostly selected outreach and research tasks (52%) with
documentation and training category in the second place (26%).
Coding was only in the fourth place with 8% (see Figure 3).
Figure 2. Overview of number of OSGeo tasks completed by
students.
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
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Figure 3. Type of OSGeo tasks completed
Mentors on average took slightly longer to respond than the
students, see Figure 4. This can be attributed to the fact that
mentors also had their normal work responsibilities.
Additionally, the mentors were located in only certain time zones
and this resulted in day/night challenges.
Figure 4. Boxplot showing the response time for both OSGeo
mentors and students
OSGeo and pgRouting had the highest number of completed
tasks, followed by OSGeo-Live and GRASS GIS. GRASS GIS
also had the highest number of abandoned and out of time tasks
(refer to Figure 5).
Figure 5. Number of tasks per OSGeo project
4.2. Mentor feedback and experience
OSGeo’s first participation in GCI was genuinely driven by
curiosity and the enthusiasm to interact with a young generation
of students. At the start of the competition, many questions came
up, such as, “What to expect from such young students?”, “Are
they capable to contribute something worthwhile for the
project?”. We adjusted our tasks and expectations throughout the
competition, but once the GCI was complete, we circulated a
short feedback survey among the mentors, to gather their
impressions and whether at the end of the day, the result was
positive and the effort worthwhile. The survey covered the
following questions: 1) were the materials produced integrated
into the various projects, 2) average time spent mentoring, 3) the
continued (active) participation of the students after GCI, and 4)
was it worthwhile for your project to participate in GCI.
OSGeo created various tasks (i.e., coding, documentation,
training, outreach, research, quality assurance and user interface)
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
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178
with the hope that some of the output created by the students
could potentially be integrated into the respective projects.
The results have been quite satisfactory, and relevant parts of the
produced output was integrated into the projects. This includes,
code, documentation, unit tests, tutorials, examples in manual
pages, to name a few. One example related to GRASS GIS,
during GCI the documentation of 12 modules was improved with
examples and/or figures. Moreover, tests for the test suite of 11
GRASS GIS modules were implemented by students and added
to the source code. However, in other cases, further work is
required before it can be integrated into the project. Referring to
Figure 3, the majority of the output were for outreach activities
in the form of blog posts, and designs for t-shirts and logos that
cannot directly be integrated into the various projects.
The next important aspect to investigate was the average
number of hours mentors spent per week. Mentors indicated
that they spent a few hours up to peaks of 20 or 30 hours per
week. This parameter, however, is strictly dependent on the
popularity of a certain task respect to others as well as mentor’s
time availability. In fact, if a task is very popular and allows
several instances, many students will claim it and the amount of
time required for the evaluation will increase dramatically.
Lastly, OSGeo participated in GCI 2017 with the intention to
encourage the pre-university students to become active
participants in the OSGeo community and its various projects.
The mentors were thus asked if any of the students decided to
keep contributing after the competition. In only very rare
occurrences did a student continue contributing to an OSGeo
project. Therefore, that result might appear as a paradox to the
next question, whether it was worthwhile for their project to
participate in GCI, but actually all OSGeo mentors replied
“Yes”. The mentors even added that it was worthwhile experience
even though it took a lot of time and effort and took place over
the Christmas holiday.
You might ask, if GCI is not fostering pre-university students’
participation in OSGeo, why do the mentors consider the GCI
contest to be worthwhile? Firstly, the human aspect in interaction
with enthusiastic young students. It is fulfilling to help eager
young students to understand, learn and do their best. On the
other hand, the students provided a fresh perspective on many
OSGeo projects. The aim of the project is suddenly shifted, the
user, smart and quick-witted, wants to obtain the result quickly
and without a previous, extensive knowledge of the software,
and, especially in the case of GIS and scientific software, this
could be deranging for the developer’s viewpoint. But during
GCI everything happens quickly, and everyone needs to be
pragmatic, and in most cases this “destabilization” resulted into
positive, quick actions: enhancing the software project’s
documentation, and improving the user interface with a fresh
perspective that will also benefit the average user in the OSGeo
community.
For some OSGeo software projects, the participation of the pre-
university students to the open source community brought a sense
of activity that sometimes feels like the spring after the winter,
raising curiosity and posing new questions and challenges. It is a
great opportunity to be able to see what we know, with fresh eyes
and a new perspective. Considering this, the response to the last
question is then not so unsurprising.
The OSGeo mentors also identified some problems and
undesirable student’s behaviours. One of these problems was
plagiarism, i.e., students submitting non-original material. This is
completely against the GCI contest rules that are signed when
entering, however, due to their age and lack of experience the
students did not have a clear understanding of the concepts (e.g.,
licensing and intellectual property). Moreover, a couple of
students’ behaviour could be defined as non-collaborative,
meaning their objective was not to learn, but rather to complete
the most number of tasks without too much effort. A student
would choose a task that they believe would be simple to
complete, but when receiving feedback, he/she would be inclined
to not follow the suggestions and rather abandon the task. Some
other students seek immediate feedback when submitting a task,
as the review time kept the student from starting a new task
(mentors have up to 24 hours to review student’s tasks). Lastly,
the tasks descriptions were not specific enough in some cases,
and students would use proprietary software they are familiar
with instead of an open source alternative. For example, students
tend to use proprietary design software they are familiar with for
logo design tasks instead of learning open source alternatives,
such as Inkscape or Gimp.
4.3. Lessons learned
As the 2017 GCI was our first experience with this type of
competition, we needed to make adjustments to the tasks and
expectations throughout the competition. Below are some lessons
learned and strategies identified to improve the process for the
2018 edition of GCI:
i) Managing the mentors’ workload
As mentioned, some mentors spent up to 30 hours a week
mentoring, and this can become quite overwhelming. However,
there are some methods to manage the workload. If there is a
specific task that is attracting numerous students, an option is to
change the number of instances to 0, in order to put a certain task
on hold. This will allow the mentors to create a similar task with
slightly different (or more difficult) requirements.
ii) Clear and well documented directives and criteria for each
task
To enable the admins and additional mentors to assist with
mentoring and evaluating popular tasks, clear notes and
directives are required. This allows fellows mentors and admins
to step in and help with the evaluation, and it is also particularly
useful when shifts are needed during holidays.
iii) Detailed task descriptions
A clearly defined task also reduces the amount of time required
to evaluate the submissions, as the students are clear on what is
expected and where to find additional resources. The mentors
should keep in mind what seems obvious for them, might not be
for the students and the additional details in the task description
might assist students to overcome unnecessary barriers.
This lesson can be implemented on a larger scale when it comes
to writing users documentation or designing a graphical user
interface (GUI). In some cases, questions posed by the students
helped developers realize what could be a potential barrier for a
first time user in the GUI or when using a certain function.
iv) Following up with students when they abandon a task or
are about to run out of time
Students are often shy and do not ask for assistance when they
encounter a barrier, especially when it is their first task. Thus,
when they struggle, the students tend to abandon the task or give
up until they run out of time. Once a student abandons a task or
there is only a couple of hours left for the task, the mentor should
send the student a message via the GCI Dashboard to follow-up
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This contribution has been peer-reviewed.
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W8-175-2018 | © Authors 2018. CC BY 4.0 License.
179
and ask if he/she has any questions. This might encourage the
student to ask questions and complete the task.
v) Preventing plagiarism
Plagiarism is against the competition rules and if a student is
caught plagiarizing they are immediately disqualified from the
competition. In some cases, the plagiarism is due to a lack of
experience and mentors should require submissions to be of such
a nature as to deter the students from easily copying work or code
from the internet. For example, asking the student to submit an
additional screenshot of the logo designed with the terminal open
displaying the student’s name.
5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we reported on our experience participating in the
2017 GCI contest and the lessons learned to improve our
approach in the next editions of GCI. We provided an overview
of the students that participated in the competition and the OSGeo
tasks completed, and also summarised the experience and
feedback of the OSGeo administrators and mentors. We
encountered a number of non-desirable and difficult to deal with
issues, such as plagiarism, managing the mentors workload, a
non-collaborative attitude of some students, and seeking
immediate feedback. As this was our first time participating in
GCI these issues are seen as lessons learned and strategies to
improve the process.
Newcomers often find it challenging to get involved in open
source communities. Steinmacher et al. (2015) performed a
systematic review and identified various barriers faced by, such
as technical hurdles, too much or unclear documentation,
previous knowledge of the newcomer and that it is difficult to
find an appropriate task to start with. Google acknowledges the
importance of open source software and open source
communities, and to promote active participation in open source
development they started the Google Code-in and Google
Summer of Code programmes. These programmes provide pre-
university and university students with a unique opportunity to
get involved in open source and overcome these potential barriers
newcomers face.
It is key to encourage these students to continue to contribute to
the OSGeo community (the winner of the competition asked for
and submitted more work even after GCI has finished!), as they
will bring new energy and ideas into the organization; for many
of these young students, this competition is a way to introduce
them to the now 400 billion USD geospatial industry (2017). For
the students, the exposure to coding and open source will be
beneficial if they intend to enrol for tertiary education, especially
in computing (Hagan and Markham 2000). Lastly, the mentors’
experience during the 2017 Google Code-in could contribute to
the outreach plan of OSGeo and provide guidelines on how to
encourage students and young professionals to get involved and
contribute to OSGeo.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank all the students, mentors,
administrators and OSGeo who have participated in the 2017
Google Code-in described in the paper. We would also like to
thank Google and the Google Code-in administrators for hosting
and coordinating the competition.
7. REFERENCES
AlphaBeta, 2017. The Economic Impact of Geospatial Services,
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economic-impact-of-geospatial-services/ (7 February 2018)
Choi, N., and Pruett, J.A., 2015. The characteristics and
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empirical study. Library and Information Science Research,
37(2), pp. 109-117.
Google, 2017. 2017 Google Code-in website,
https://codein.withgoogle.com/archive/ (27 April 2018)
Google, 2018, Google Code-in 2017: more is merrier!,
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/02/google-code-in-
2017-more-is-merrier.html (27 April 2018)
Hagan, D., and Markham, S., 2000. Does it help to have some
programming experience before beginning a computing degree
programme. Proceedings of the Innovation and Technology in
Computer Science Education, July 11-13, 2000, Helsinki,
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Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), 2018, OSGeo
website, https://www.osgeo.org (7 February 2018)
Steinmacher, I., Silva, M.A.G., Gerosa, M.A., and Redmiles,
D.F., 2015. A systematics literature review on the barriers faced
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The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W8, 2018
FOSS4G 2018 – Academic Track, 29–31 August 2018, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This contribution has been peer-reviewed.
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W8-175-2018 | © Authors 2018. CC BY 4.0 License.
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