As many of our loyal blog readers will know, the MetaBrainz Foundation has been part of the Google Summer of Code for several years. This year we’re going to expand into the realm of Google Code‐in!
Google Code‐in, or GCI, is a program aimed at pre-university students aged 13–17. Unlike the Summer of Code (GSoC), the students will have a large number of smaller tasks to work on, instead of working on one large/huge task for the duration of the summer. It is set up as a competition and the students who do the most work will be eligible to win some Google prizes.
But what does this have to do with us? I’ll tell you what! We were accepted in this year’s Code-in! Over the last few weeks, I and a couple of other people (mostly on IRC) have been preparing for the GCI, but that does not mean we’re done yet – we can still very much use more hands. The competition starts on December 7th—that’s Monday next week! This means that we will have a flood of young people come into #musicbrainz and #metabrainz on IRC as well as possibly the forums. Please be courteous and patient; these young people will hopefully stick around Music– and MetaBrainz for long after the GCI and become full‐blown members of the community, but they need some incubation time. (Also, if you only sometimes frequent IRC, next week in particular would be a lovely time to have “all hands on deck”. Doubly so if you’re in the far eastern hemisphere as students will be coming from all different time zones and regions, and we only have a couple of East Asian and Australasian people in the IRC rooms.)
We are also continually looking for task suggestions. They can be for or from pretty much anything related to any MetaBrainz projects (we will have a number of *Brainz related tasks for beets for example), so let your creative juices flow and let us know what (small) things you would like some of these students to work on. The wikipage has some more information about what kind of tasks are acceptable. Keep in mind that they should generally be doable within 3–6 hours, but if you’re in doubt, feel free to poke one of our GCI mentors and ask.
Speaking of mentors, we could really use more mentors who are familiar with our various code bases. If you think that’s you, please, please, please poke me (Freso) on IRC and we can get things sorted. Of course, even if you don’t think you’ll be able to be a dedicated mentor, just hanging around IRC and helping students will also be a huge help and relieve the mentors somewhat to spend time on reviewing submitted work, entering additional tasks, etc.
I’m personally, and I know others are too, really excited about this. It’s a great opportunity to hopefully get a lot of low‐hanging fruit picked off as well as recruiting some new (hopefully) long‐term community members and contributors. However, it is also our first year in this program, so none of us really know what we’ve signed up for. It’s an adventure! And I hope you will be joining us. 😉
PS. If you know any pre-university students aged 13–17, tell them about the program and maybe use this as a way to lure them into the Brainzverse! 😄
MetaBrainz Blog 
“call to arms”? Are you sure this kind of call-up is appropriate? Maybe it’s just me and I misunderstand the meaning (or joke), but it seems very strange to me.
A number of native speakers were asked and don’t think it can be understood literally.
I have two sisters in pre-university, they both are good in technology, she can develop a website. I will share this with her. But I need more information, how to register name or enroll in this program.
There should be information (FAQs etc.) available on https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/. The sign‐up itself I think just happens on the contest site, but I’m not entirely sure. Hope your sisters find interest in the program, regardless of whether they go with MetaBrainz or one of the other excellent organisations that are part of this year’s GCI. 🙂