Congratulations to our Challenge winners!
We had many amazing projects and would like to thank everyone that participated. We’d also like to thank our judges for reviewing all of the applications and selecting the winning and runner-up projects listed here. For more details about our winners, please see the descriptions below.
Winner
BOSS: Big Open Source Sibling
Runner-up
OpenUK Kids’ Courses and Associated Digital Camps
Phase Two Winners
For more details about our Phase Two winners, please see the descriptions below.
OpenUK Kids’ Courses and associated Digital Camps
Phase One Winners
BOSS: Big Open Source Sibling
Carla Silva Rocha Aguiar, Bruna Pinos de Oliveira, Bruna Nayara Moreira Lima, Clarissa Borges
BOSS aims to reach underrepresented groups in tech who want to be mentored and assisted in learning how to work on open source projects. BOSS will provide a safe space and an accompanying methodology for them to learn basic concepts of working in a small open-source chatbot boilerplate project. The mentoring will focus on improving their technical skill and confidence to contribute to FOSS. The mentor team is composed only of women, with previous experience in both FOSS and developing chatbots. We will apply this project in Brazil, a country with significant social inequality, and we chose the theme chatbot because it has an increasing professional demand in the software industry. We will also focus the mentoring in dealing with Competence-Confidence Gap observed in under-represented groups in the software industry, which affect their contribution to FOSS and in their job.
Broadening Participation through Scaffolded Sustained FOSS Engagement in an Undergraduate Computing Curriculum
Grant Braught, Farhan Siddiqui, Michael Skalak, Allen Tucker
Broadening Participation through Scaffolded Sustained FOSS Engagement in an Undergraduate Computing Curriculum redesigns an undergraduate computing curriculum, infusing it with FOSS and computing for the greater good, making both an intrinsic part about how future computing professionals think about their work and their world. A collection of open educational materials and course modules will be developed that engage students in sustained FOSS participation, from their first course through their senior capstone.
Creative FOSS
Dennis Krasnov
Software isn’t just about the code. Good software requires a good user experience. But what do graphic/UI/UX designers, marketers, copywriters, animators, translators, and other creative people have in common? They almost never contribute to FOSS, and that’s an issue. Creative FOSS aims to lower the barrier to entry of contributing to open source projects, specifically for non-technical people. No command line, no building the project from sources, and no spooky git commands, just a dead simple streamlined way for creative people of various professions to contribute their work.
Eureka Universe
Team of Eurekas Community
Eureka Universe (EU) is a Business Analytics platform that uses a universal representation based on fuzzy logic predicates and related techniques. Its feature from other analytical tools is that EU does not require the users to have significant knowledge of areas other than their own field that can be incorporated in the form of natural language. EU works with a client-server architecture written in free code that focuses on the user’s dataset. Eureka Universe (EU) allows its users to exploit this dataset to i) assess user knowledge, or ii) discover new knowledge. Our goal is to improve EU by incorporating it into the FOSS and GNOME communities. Since EU can interact with not necessarily expert coders, its users can collaborate by coding, discussing, and supporting through forums and by creating and sharing projects, analytic tools, and scripts.
First Contributions
Roshan Jossy
First Contributions help beginners get started with contributing to open source projects. The project has three parts:
- A repository in GitHub that acts as a hands-on tutorial to help beginners make their first contribution to the same repository. This is translated into 60 languages thanks to our awesome contributors. We have over 20,000 people who have already submitted their first open source pull request to this repo. We’re constantly trying to make sure that this is accessible to most people who visit the project.
- A web app to help users find projects with issues that they can contribute to. Currently, we maintain a list of beginner-friendly projects and point users to `/contribute` route of each project where users can find issues that they might be interested to work on.
- A forum to discuss open source and get help. Currently, we have a slack community to do this. There are over 3,500 members but there’s no active engagement or discussions there. The idea is to help people who are struggling to get the development setup of a particular project to get set up, help contributors understand how parts of a project work or understand where to start to fix an issue.
FLOSS Desktops for Kids
Cassidy Layman, Michele McColgan
Kids can’t code without computers. FLOSS Desktops for Kids helps under-served students access technology by building their own open source powered computers. The program provides hands-on learning in technology, coding, and engineering through collaborative projects utilizing refurbished computers and open source tools and development platforms (e.g. GIMP, GoDot.org, IDLE, Scratch, Sugar, and many others). Once completed, students take their computers home… “for keeps.”
Organized through “M.A.K.E’s”, FLOSS Desktops provides instructors with:
- Materials: an inventory of supplies, tools, and technologies for each session.
- Activities: teaching and learning exercises, worksheets, and projects.
- Knowledge: specific learning objectives
- Evaluations: outcomes in line with ITSE standards.
FOSS–Campus
Saloni Garg, Amit Sagtani
FOSS–Campus aims to build a platform to guide students step-by-step on how to get started with open source, in a fun and engaging manner. Firstly, students will be asked to choose their topics of interest, like UI, Technical Writing, Python, C++, etc. and then they will be assigned some beginner-friendly tasks in their chosen area, which aim at introducing open source organizations and their codebase to the students. Credits will be rewarded on completion of each task, which can later be used to redeem the organization’s swags. Bots are integrated to solve the basic queries, and mentors will also be available on chat. A community forum will be built for any other questions students might have.
FOSSCoop, a platform for student cooperative playground
Luca Di Grazia, Federico Garbuglia
FOSScoop is a web platform which covers theory and practice exercises, to help anyone in the development of coding skills. The theory is addressed in the Wiki section of our platform, in which articles explaining basic concepts of programming, Open Source, FOSS, GNU/Linux are gathered. The wiki is divided in three levels: beginners, intermediate and advanced. A Q/A section is available, where people can ask questions, express doubts, where mutual help is exercised.
The practice exercises are encouraged in the core section of our platform: the Bulletin Board. Here, new challenges are listed and constantly added. Specific challenges are designed for beginners, leveraging on children-related topics to stimulate curiosity in young age coders. Their completion is rewarded according to a system of ratings and achievements.
FossDorm
Sarvottam Kumar
FossDorm aims to bring new contributors into the open source community and engage them forever. To achieve the same target, app fulfills three basic needs:
- Where to find my skill-based suitable project: GitHub is a large ocean where new contributors find hard to search for project meeting their demands. Hence, this app has a section listing all verified and approved open source project.
- How to contribute: Even after finding a project, contributors sometimes fail to engage with the community. Documentation for beginners is one of the main reasons. Hence, each project in this app will contain a must-have page providing a minimum of three details in both text and video format. That is, about the project, how to set up a project and get started, and how to stay in touch with the community.
- How to engage contributors forever: Contributors need to manually paste their merged code link into the app to get a reputation point or badges. This will encourage and also build their profile displaying the amount of open source contribution.
Handibox
Matias Rojas-Tapia, Alejandro Valdés-Jiménez, Fabio Durán-Verdugo
Handibox is an accessibility tool that will allow Human-Computer interaction with people who have some degree of motor disability. Through the Handibox, people will have the possibility to carry out elementary activities such as, using the Internet, writing emails, sending messages, etc. Additionally and as an extra plus, Handibox serves as support in physical therapy activities for people who must perform exercises that involve neck movement. We also seek to integrate with other accessibility applications existing in GNOME and, as possible, deliver more experiences that allow us to improve with new characteristics (eye blink detection) and enhancement to the Handibox project and for gnome accessibility apps.
Init.oss
Sam Robbins
Init.oss introduces people to contributing to FOSS. This project is designed for users of a range of skill levels, from beginner to advanced. For beginners, there are programming tutorials, and for more advanced users, suggestions of issues to resolve. The project consists of the following stages:
- Teach the basics of a range of languages, such as HTML and Python
- Teach the basics of contributing to open source, such as how to use Git and GitHub
- Practice skills on projects I create that need something adding
- Practice skills on closed GitHub issues, with solutions and hints available.
- Get directed towards real issues that it is likely that they will have the skill to solve
The Institute for Computing in Research Summer Internship Program
Rhonda K Crespo, Mark Galassi
We are a consortium of students, scientists, and teachers who work together to promote computational scientific research in our community. Our summer internship program currently consists of ten students who partner with a scientist-mentor during a four-week summer program. The key goal of the program is to train students in research, computer programming, and computational thinking. They focus on a research project for the majority of their time, and, during the rest of their time, they attend guest lectures and learn a host of research skills. Student interns work a 35-hour work-week and receive an educational stipend. They craft their project with guidance from their mentor and then write code on the GNU/Linux operating system. We train and recruit students from schools throughout our community and have a high percentage of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and under-represented minorities here in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Leapcode
Sethu Sathyan, Athul Suresh
Leapcode is a gamified platform to help open source contributors. The project aims to solve through an online platform that rewards and motivates first-time contributors. Contributors create an account on the Leapcode platform & start with a First Time Pull Request project to make their first PR / open-source contribution in under 15 minutes. After that, each project will help them in contributing more, learning new technical skills, interacting with the community, and ultimately improving their coding skills. They earn points & badges as they fix issues or add features across different projects. Leapcode will have a streamlined process with the right resources and mentors to support for each open source project.
Learn more and contribute.
(invite code: awesome-early-leapers-536)
LET’S GNOME!
Jim Hall
A series of hands-on workshops for universities: Examples of workshops will be a class that helps attendees learn how to write GNOME applications (for example, writing their first GNOME application) and another will help attendees to learn how to contribute to open source (including how to use Git and other tools, how to submit a patch outside of Git, etc).
Rhea
Vladimir Mikulic
Rhea is designed to be the world’s first Linux development learning platform. What makes Rhea unique is that it will offer both video and text (articles) based courses focused on Linux development. Rhea will offer a beginner (Vala programming, GTK app development…) as well as advanced (app optimizations, networking, app packaging and publishing…) courses. This will make it easy for novice programmers to learn and fall in love with the Linux ecosystem, start developing apps for the platform, fix bugs, develop features for existing apps, desktop environments, distros and pretty much anything! More developers = richer desktop experience = more users = profit.
Open Source Made Easy – OSME
Kapil Gautam
OSME is a GNOME desktop application and will be a one-stop guide for all the beginning coders in the FOSS community. Key features of this application include:
- Login feature based on Github authentication.
- Home screen with all the necessary resources to get users started with open source.
- Collection of curated top repositories based on languages (C/C++/Java/Javascript/Typescript etc).
- Collection of curated top repositories based on different topics (Operating System/ Networking/ Machine Learning/ Cloud/ iOS/ Android/Web etc).
- Women-specific opportunities and best resources.
- List of top new contributors signed up on the application, every month.
This application will be built using the process of GNOME applications with open source tools. In addition to that, this application will be open sourced for anyone to use, edit and contribute.
OpenUK Kids’ Courses and associated Digital Camps
Amanda Brock, David Whale, Steph Bower, Pamela Boal, Kim Russell, Drawnalism, animators
We have begun our project of teaching kids both to code and to learn about open source, via short and fun animated lessons. Each lesson is 10(ish) minutes long and builds the confidence of the kids participating in the course, starting by teaching them to build and use the MiniMu glove, incorporating a BBC micro:bit. Of course the micro:bit is already open technology and the MiniMu glove has been open sourced as part of our project. Each episode includes one minute of information about an aspect of open, whether that is “what is source code”, “why do you need a license” or “how to contribute and become a part of the community”? Our animations are fun and as confidence grows for the user, encourages increasing levels of creativity, something identified as an issue in secondary kids today. Lessons have also been reviewed to align with the UK curriculum for Key Stage 3 kids (11-14 years old) in England and Wales and the equivalent across the UK, but the course is accessible to kids at all UK secondary (high school) age. We hope it will also support kids who may struggle with the very academic approach taken in the UK Computer Science GCSE and encourage them into coding and plan a vocational qualification for the UK supported by OpenUK.
The Open University Project
B. Veli Tasalı, Mert Gör
The Open University Project is a communication network that assigns beginner coders to volunteer developers and aims to educate them in the open-source community and help them contribute to FOSS projects before they are ready. When they are ready, they are declared successful and given a certificate. The coders’ later success will also be the educators’ success.
ProgramKitsForEveryone
Stefan Nikolaj
ProgramKitsforEveryone takes inspiration from the DIY tutorials of home computers in the 80s. A “program kit” would be delivered digitally or physically which contains all the tools needed to create a small to medium sized project. A document would be included that contains examples of the finished program in action, an explanation in text (or pseudocode) of how the systems of the program interact and what needs to be done to make it work. Then, some of the foundational code and challenges to extend the functionality beyond the example will be included. The reader would be encouraged to code it on their own, but a finished version would be included in the back of the document. All the tools necessary would be included, and all of them would be FOSS.
welOSS (Welcome to FOSS)
Mehant Kammakomati, Sai Vittal B
The welOSS platform analyzes every OSS project available on the major version control systems and grabs metrics such as stars, contributors, language, releases, TODOs, and many more, which can help newcomers in choosing the right project according to their preferences. Based on metrics and user preferences, it’ll also link the resources ranging from code tutorials to communication guides enabling them to get started. Features like contact contributors will help them to get in-person help in navigating through the project issues and goals. This way, any newcomer can see himself onboard the FOSS community. As a measure to keep users engrossed and contributing, we’ll have a reward system similar to the reputation metric of Stack Overflow, based on the contributions made to an OSS project.