[Talk-us] Any interest in Google Code-In?

Richard Weait richard at weait.com
Fri Oct 29 13:47:39 BST 2010


On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:07 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> At the Google Summer of Code mentors summit this past weekend Google asked
> us (the organizations that participated in Summer of Code) to also
> participate in the Google Code-In project. The Code-In project is similar to
> the Summer of Code but for 13-18 year olds. The tasks are meant to be much
> smaller: the students are supposed to sign up for one task at a time, they
> get $100 for every 3 tasks they complete (up to $500).
> I talked a bit with Carol (the Google woman running the project) who liked
> me suggestion for putting up a bunch of mapping-related projects. For
> example, a project could be "map 100 restaurants in your area" or "map all
> stores in mall X".

I'm not in favour of this idea.  Mapping for pay will encourage gaming
the system for money and ripping data from other sources.  It will
also create a group of mappers who will stop when the money runs out
and potentially resentment among the mappers who have mapped thousands
of restaurants for the love of mapping or the love of their town.

If there are bite-sized code contributions, let's have a look at that.
 GSoC already has retention issues in the larger projects.  Not every
GSoC student continues with their project after the summer period.  I
see this as a larger problem in a project with a lower initial barrier
to entry.



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