Fostering pre-university student participation in OSGeo through the Google Code-in competition

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) was founded in 2006 and the number of projects under its umbrella is steadily growing. The current projects cover content management systems, desktop applications, geospatial libraries, metadata catalogs, 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). In 2011, the GeoForAll initiative was established through a partnership between OSGeo and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) to focus on open education. Three years later, the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) joined this memorandum of understanding emphasizing the importance of educational outreach and open source for the larger geospatial community. At present, GeoForAll consists of 122 labs, mainly based at universities 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 understand why individuals between 18-29 are not (yet) actively involved. OSGeo is a veteran organization having participated in Google Summer of Code for 11 years, and in 2017 decided to participate for the first time in the Code-in contest as well. 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. Students qualify for different prizes (i.e. certificate, t-shirts, hoodies and the grand prize of visiting Google) depending on the number of tasks they complete. During GCI, participating organizations, such as OSGeo, have a unique opportunity to interact with pre-university students and to encourage them to become part of their respective organizations. In this paper, we present our experience participating in the 2017/18 GCI and the results from a survey completed by the GCI students after the competition. Overall the 2017/2018 GCI had 3,555 participating students from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks with a record 25 open source participating organizations. OSGeo had 20 members (i.e. 4 admins and 16 mentors) that created 176 tasks for GeoForAll, OSGeo and 11 projects (i.e. FOSS4G, GeoServer, GeoTools, GRASS GIS, gvSIG, MapServer, OpenLayers, OSGeoLive, pgRouting, PostGIS, and QGIS). Over the 51 days of the contest, 279 students completed 649 OSGeo tasks. Students consistently communicated through the GCI dashboard, IRC, and mailing lists 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 (i.e. documentation, coding and design tasks) were very good and some of them are now part of the projects. One example is related to GRASS GIS project, during GCI the documentation of 12 modules was improved with examples and/or figures. Moreover, tests for the test suite of 11 modules were added. However, we also encountered a number of non-desirable and difficult to deal with issues, such as plagiarism, 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 will be implemented based on the mentors’ experience. It is key to encourage these students to continue to contribute to the OSGeo community (the winner of the contest asked for and submitted more work even after GCI has finished!), as they will bring new energy and ideas into the organisation; for many of these young students, this contest 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 enroll for tertiary education, especially in computing (Hagan and Markham 2000). Lastly, the results from the survey and the mentors’ experience during the 2017/2018 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. References: Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) website, available online at https://www.osgeo.org, accessed on 7 February 2018. Choi N and Pruett JA (2015) The characteristics and motivations of library open source software developers: An empirical study, Library and Information Science Research, 37(2), pp. 109-117. 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, Helsinki, Finland, 11-13 July 2000. AlphaBeta (2017) The Economic Impact of Geospatial Services, Value of the Web, available online at https://www.valueoftheweb.com/reports/the-economic-impact-of-geospatial-services/, accessed on 7 February 2018.