Further Information for Student Contestants
Contents
Running GNOME
For most of the tasks you need a recent GNOME environment running. Any recent distribution (like Fedora, openSuse, Mandriva, Gentoo, or partially Ubuntu) do the job, but if you don't have one installed, or what you have is too old, checkout Jhbuild which can compile and install the most recent version in parallel to your stable system. Be warned that you will likely run into problems when trying for the first time but the GNOME community and information on the wiki will help you. For just a quick use of the latest GNOME version a live CD of a recent distribution might also work out.
Getting Help
If you have signed up to complete a particular task and you have some specific questions about how best to complete it, first check the task description for who to contact for assistance. For general questions these resources should be helpful to you:
GNOME Library website: This is the general help site that includes tutorials, manuals, API documentation, etc.
gnome-love mailinglist: This is the mailing list to help new contributors join the GNOME project. This list will also be used for the whole Google Code-In contest. You should definitely subscribe to this mailing list. Please let us know where you've looked for the answer already. GNOME contributors are monitoring the list and will answer questions or get you in touch with the right person. Students are encouraged to answer questions as well and use the mailing list to communicate with one another. If you have asked your question on the mailing list but find you need a more granular answer, please reply to the mailing list and not only to the person who provided you the answer.
- gnome-love IRC chat channel: In #gnome-love on irc.gnome.org you can ask any questions you may have. If people don't know the answer, they will be happy to point you in the right direction. Please be patient on IRC as people are not always in front of their computers, and please just ask your question directly instead of asking to ask. IRC applications are for example Empathy or Xchat.
Contacting the Administrators
If you need to contact a GNOME administrator for Google Code-In, please contact the soc-mentors-list mailing list. It is a private mailing list where you can reach all the administrators. Please prefer sending a mail to the gnome-love mailing list for issues that are not private.
Licensing and Attribution
The Google Code-In contest requires any code and other contributions you provide to be given under an open source license, to ensure your work is available for use by anyone in the world.
The GNOME modules are released under various free software licenses, generally the GPLv2 (and later) and the LGPLv2 (and later). Therefore you agree that the code, ideas and all other aspects of your contributions in your entry are released under the same license as the the module you're contributing to, so that they may be included in the GNOME project.
More info: Contest Official Rules.
We are very pleased to have your help and as a courtesy are happy to attribute your work in various places, for example in blog posts. We will assume you want your name mentioned unless you suggest an alias, or the desire to remain anonymous.
Other Questions
If you have a question not answered here that is related to contest mechanics, your best bet is to check out Google's contest page for more details. You can also contact the Google Code-In Discuss mailing list.
If you have a question not answered here that is related to a particular task or about the GNOME project in general, please contact the gnome-love mailing list.