After being mentors for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program for more than 10 years, we decided also to mentor pre-university students in the Google Code-in (GCI) program.
Google Code-in is a contest that gives pre-university students (ages 13-17) the opportunity to work with real open source organizations. The students receive bite-sized tasks, that are easy for beginners to jump in and get started no matter what skills they have.
This was the first year we participated as an organization and it was also one of the best years for the program. GCI 2017 was the 8th annual edition organized by Google, with 3,555 students from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks. XWiki was one of the 25 open source organizations involved.
We had 489 successfully completed tasks thanks to 380 students and 12 mentors involved in the program.
The program ran from 28 November 2017 to 17 January 2018, see the timeline. Although the period was during the winter holidays, this allowed students more time to work on their extra-curricular activities. Our mentors made extra efforts to make sure all questions were answered, tasks reviewed and validated, and that every student felt how the open source world works. There are many things to learn, starting with development best practices, to how to communicate, how to work collaboratively on a different time zone, how to test your changes, etc.
At the end of the contest, each organization picked two Grand Prize Winners who will be flown together with a parent to Northern California, in the summer of 2018, to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, and meet Google engineers.
Special thanks to our finalists since they were the most involved students with our project. Would be amazing to hear how your trip goes and also don't forget that now you are part of our community and we are very thankful to have you.
Our 5 finalists are: 
- Akshit Dewan (Grand Prize Winner)
- Arun Pattni (Grand Prize Winner)
- Siddh Raman Pant
- Akash Chandrasekaran
- Srijan Jha
Srijan Jha already shared his experience with the program in his blog post. We also loved having you around in our community and it's great that you want to be a mentor in the next years. That's what this program is all about. Arun Pattni also shared his experience with the program.
We also want to thank our 23 students that submitted usable code in our repositories. Congratulations again and thank you for your work!
While GCI is completed for this year, GSoC has just begun. So we might have another chance to work together and improve XWiki for everyone. The accepted mentor organizations will be announced on February 12, 2018.
Thanks to everyone who participated. Your energy gives us fuel and we always learn so much one from another.
