Last week, we had a presentation on Google Summer of Code and Outreachy at Brno University of Technology. Around 80 students attended which was a pretty good success considering it was not part of any course. It was a surprise for the uni people as well because the room they booked was only for 60 ppl.

The main reason why we did the presentation is that there have been very few students in Brno who participated in such programs. And the open source community is pretty big at local universities due to the presence of Red Hat. When we asked students who had heard of Google Summer of Code or Outreachy before only two raised their hands. That was even fever then we expected.

Shortly before the presentation, we discovered that the money reward for successfully finishing Google Summer of Code was not the same globally any more. And for the Czech Republic, it’s now $3600 instead of $5500. So considerably less, but still fairly attractive to local students.

As a follow-up to this presentation, we organized a GNOME hackaton in the Red Hat lab at BUT. Carlos Soriano was in charge of it with me, Felipe Borges, and Debarshi Ray helping him. Carlos prepared images for VirtualBox and KVM with a prepared development environment every student was supposed to download. People had to work in a virtual machine, but they didn’t have to spend time configuring and compiling everything and it assured that everyone had the same environment.

Around 12 students showed up which I think was a good turnout. 3 of them were women which is definitely higher % than the average at the uni. First Carlos told them to read the GNOME Newcomers guide and pick an app they’d like to contribute to. Then he created a dummy bug and showed students the whole process of fixing it from searching the code to the patch review. Then they were supposed to find some easy bug in the app of their choice and fix it.

Almost all students picked apps written in C, which is not so surprising because that’s the language they learn primarily at the university. Only one picked GNOME Music written in Python. The hackaton lasted for 5 hours and all students were busy for the whole time and almost everyone submitted some fix in the end.

Carlos is planning to do a follow-up with those who want to continue, probably before our (ir)regular Linux Desktop Meetup next week. Let’s see if some of them will make it to Google Summer of Code or Outreachy and even become long-term contributors to GNOME later on. It was the first time we actually made students to dip their fingers into the code. At all events before we had presentations on how they can contribute and pointed them to the docs to study at home, but the response was minimal. Maybe such a hackaton where you help students in person to make the first steps is the right approach to break through the barrier.

I’m pretty sure Carlos will also blog about his findings and it will be much more insightful since he spent a lot of time preparing the hackaton and was the one who talked to the students the most.