Metrics, spikes, and uncertainty: Open source contribution during a global pandemic

Welcome to the second edition of our Open Source Programs Office’s (OSPO) annual open source transparency report. In last year's report on 2019 open source activity, we focused on discovering baselines and trends for Alphabet’s open source activities. However, this past year was unlike any other in recent history. While many continue to investigate the impact of the global pandemic on work, productivity, and behavior, we wanted to understand the pandemic’s impact on Alphabet’s participation in open source.

Our mission within OSPO is to bring the value of open source to Google and the resources of Google to open source. While open source software remains a critical component of our infrastructure, products, and services, in 2020 we increased our focus on connecting with peers and supporting our extended communities across open source ecosystems. In addition to numerous Alphabet-led initiatives and programs, our open source community provided resources, funding, and technical support for projects and communities impacted by the global pandemic.

Before we jump into the data, we want to acknowledge that broad generalizations will never capture the complete context or complexities of personal experience. With these limitations in mind, we will attempt to aggregate what we learned from this past year and explore how our priorities, programs, and adjustments may have affected our measurements and reporting. For more details on the data source and methodology, see the “about this data” section below.

Open source engagement increased as employees moved to their homes

In March 2020, Alphabet closed our offices and required most employees to work from home. In addition to changing workplaces, we adapted our internship program for virtual participation, focusing many technical projects on open source. This inflection point directly impacted our open source contributor behavior, as observed by monthly active user trends—defined as users that logged any activity in a given month:

• Before March 2020, our GitHub monthly active user counts were relatively stable: In any given month during 2019, about 45% of our yearly active contributing population logged activity on GitHub. Per month in 2019, this value was fairly consistent, with a relative standard deviation of 3%.
• More GitHub users were active after March 2020: Starting in March 2020, our monthly active users grew by more than 20% and then continued to grow into April through July with the arrival of our interns. In addition to growth, activity fluctuated more dramatically with a relative standard deviation of 19%. Removing interns, this value dropped to 13%—still significantly higher than 2019.
• Git-on-borg user patterns remained stable: On git-on-borg—our internal production Git service (more details below), more than 50% of users counted in this analysis were active per month. Activity levels were fairly stable in 2020 with a relative standard deviation of 3%, indicating that our behavior on git-on-borg was less impacted by pandemic-related changes. Note that less than 10% of our 2020 open source interns were active on git-on-borg as most worked on GitHub.

To identify more context behind this change in behavior, we explored our population, projects, and programs, in and around open source.

This chart shows Alphabet’s monthly active users on GitHub, split by total, full-time employees, and interns.

Population: Our population of contributors grew as our composition shifted

In 2020, more than 10% of Alphabet full-time employees (FTEs) actively contributed to open source projects. This percentage has remained roughly consistent over the last five years, indicating that our open source contribution has scaled with the growth of Alphabet.

In addition to our FTEs, some of Alphabet's vendors, independent contractors, temporary staff, and interns have also contributed to open source during their tenures. From 2015-2019, this group represented about 3-5% of our total population of open source contributors. In 2020, this ratio doubled to 10% as many interns shifted to focus on open source. As a result, interns represented about 9% of our overall open source contributing population in 2020.

This chart shows the aggregate per year counts of Alphabet employees, vendors, contractors, temps, and interns contributing to open source.

Scope: We created and interacted with more repositories and projects

Within Google-managed organizations, we created more than 2,000 new public repositories on GitHub, bringing our total active public repositories to over 9,000 on GitHub and over 1,500 on git-on-borg. While many of these new repositories were created within existing projects or to extend functionality of our products, more than 20% of our new GitHub repositories were created to host our interns’ open source projects. Moving forward, we anticipate that our total public repositories under management will stabilize or even shrink as we refine our depreciation and archival policies. In addition to supporting our own projects:

• We engaged with more repositories on GitHub: In 2020, contributors at Alphabet interacted with more than 90,000 repositories on GitHub, pushing commits and/or opening pull requests on over 50,000 repositories. Removing passive interactions (WatchEvents or “stars”), we actively engaged with over 75,000 repositories in 2020.
• We surpassed our growth rates from 2019. Across all metrics listed above, we engaged with 25% more repositories than in 2019—a growth rate significantly higher than last year’s growth rate of 15%-18%. These rates are not impacted by removing the repositories that supported our interns.
• We continue to invest time in projects outside of Google: Consistent with our 2019 report, on GitHub more than 75% of repositories with pull requests opened by Alphabet contributors were outside of Google-managed organizations.

Behavior: Contribution activities increased, elevated by our interns

To take a closer look at our behavior, we explored all event types across GitHub Archive, grouping events into the following categories:

Category groups	GitHub Event Types
Code	PushEvent, PullRequestEvent, ForkEvent
Code Review	PullRequestReviewEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent, CommitCommentEvent
Issue	IssuesEvent, IssueCommentEvent
Maintenance and administration	MemberEvent, CreateEvent, DeleteEvent, ReleaseEvent, PublicEvent
Wiki/Doc	GollumEvent
Star	WatchEvent

Exploring trends across event types, we found that:

• GitHub activity grew across all event types: This is not surprising given our growth in the contributing population and repository counts described above. More specifically, in 2020, contributors at Alphabet created more than 780,000 issue comments, and opened over 240,000 pull requests on GitHub. Compared to 2019, we generated 32% more issue comments and opened 50% more pull requests in 2020. Removing WatchEvents, in 2020 our overall activity on GitHub grew by more than 35%.
• Interns bolstered our growth on GitHub: While in previous years, full-time Alphabet employees were responsible for over 97% of all reported activity on GitHub, in 2020 interns opened more than 10% of Alphabet’s total pull requests on this platform.
• git-on-borg’s growth rate was consistent with 2019: Where our GitHub activity growth rates increased, our submitted and reviewed changes on git-on-borg grew by 17%, consistent with our 2018-2019 year-over-year growth on this platform and on GitHub. This consistent trajectory once again implies that individuals working on git-on-borg did not significantly change their behavior as a result of the global pandemic. Please note, that the activity pulled from git-on-borg for this analysis was only from Google managed projects where GitHub logs also included non-Google organizations and personal activity.

This chart shows per-month counts of activities initiated by the Alphabet community on GitHub.

Note: not showing “PullRequestReviewEvent”, which GitHub Archive started collecting in August 2020.

Changes: What drove this change in behavior?

While 2020 behavior cannot be separated from the impact of the global pandemic, we were curious if we could isolate specific programs and externalities that would explain the uptick in monthly active users and spikes in logged activities. Again, acknowledging the limitations of aggregate analysis, we found evidence that these measurements were impacted by:

• Intern hosts: In May-Sept, we welcomed more than 1000 interns and set them to work on open source projects. In addition to intern-driven activities, teams that hosted interns had to interact with these projects in public channels, which contributed to additional individuals logging actions on GitHub between April and September.
• Tenured employees. To investigate other drivers of the March 2020 uplift in GitHub monthly active users, we filtered out interns and individuals that were new to Alphabet in 2020, which led us to believe that this increase could mostly be attributed to existing employees increasing their time on GitHub.
• Hacktoberfest: During Hacktoberfest (October 2020), we saw a significant spike in activity with the largest uptick concentrated in issue-related activities, as open source contributors at Alphabet responded to activities initiated during this event.

We also interviewed open source contributors around the organization to understand how their professional and personal open source activity may have been impacted due to COVID-19. Although each case was unique, common themes were:

• Remote work: With most teams working remotely, some reported that they relied more heavily on asynchronous tooling for collaboration and code review, which would yield additional logged activities on hosting platforms.
• Open source as a personal outlet: For others, open source provided a place to create and socialize outside of work. This trend was also reported in GitHub’s Octoberverse report on productivity which showed an uptick in open source activity outside of traditional work hours.

Please note, that Alphabet’s aggregate experience does not translate to behavioral or productivity trends in specific projects that we work on. For example, leading up to Kubernetes’ 1.19 release in May 2020, community leaders reported declining engagement, measured by a 15% decline in daily pull request reviews across Kubernetes organizations compared to the 2019 average.

Beyond code: We continue to invest in all aspects of open source

Alphabet relies on the health and availability of open source projects, and as such we continue to invest in security and sustainability across the supply chain, from respectful language updates in our own projects to:

• Mentorship and community engagement: In its 16th year of the program, Google’s 2020 Summer of Code program had 1,106 students from 65 countries successfully complete the program under the guidance of over 2,000 mentors. In its second year, Season of Docs sponsored 87 technical writers working on 48 projects with the support of over 100 mentors. And with in-person events postponed until further notice, we launched the Google Open Source Live monthly series to connect with our extended community, hosting 5 events last year, 7 so far in 2021, and more planned in the final quarters of 2021.
• Improving open source stability and security: Security challenges are never going to disappear, and we must work together to maintain the security of the open source software we collectively depend on. In 2020, Google co-founded the OpenSSF to collaborate on tools and frameworks to improve open source security. As part of this community, we released Criticality Score and provided significant contributions to project Scorecards to help users, contributors, companies, and communities generate relative criticality metrics for projects that they depend on. Additionally, in 2020 the OSS-Fuzz project nearly doubled the number of supported projects to more than 400 projects, and identified more than 25,000 bugs. In addition to the main effort, the Fuzz team hosted interns, launched the Atheris Python Fuzzer, and ramped up a FuzzBench service to help academic researchers run large scale experiments on their fuzzing tools.

Despite perpetual uncertainty, we will continue to invest in the open source ecosystem as we value the connection, collaboration and community even when we are kept apart by a global pandemic. Learn more about our open source initiatives at opensource.google.

About the data:

• Data source: These data represent activities on repositories hosted on GitHub and our internal production Git service git-on-borg. These sources represent a subset of open source activity currently tracked by our OSPO.
• GitHub: We continue to use GitHub Archive as the primary source for GitHub data, which is available as a public dataset on BigQuery. Alphabet activity within GitHub is identified by self-registered accounts, which we estimate underreports actual activity. This year we decided to generate this report from Monthly Tables instead of Yearly Tables in order to explore contribution patterns within the year.
• git-on-borg: This is our primary platform for internal projects and some of our larger, long running public projects like Android and Chromium. While we continue to develop on this platform, most of our open source activity has moved to GitHub to increase exposure and encourage community growth.
• Distinct event types: Note that git-on-borg and GitHub APIs produce distinct sets of events—as such we will report activity metrics per platform. Where GitHub Event logs capture a wide range of activity from code creation and review to issue creation and comments, the Gerrit Event stream (used by git-on-borg) only captures code changes and reviews.
• Driven by humans: We have created many automated bots and systems that can propose changes on various hosting platforms. We have intentionally filtered these data to focus on human-initiated activities.
• Business and personal: Activity on GitHub reflects a mixture of Alphabet projects, third party projects, experimental efforts, and personal projects. Our metrics report on all of the above unless otherwise specified.
• Alphabet contributors: Please note that unless additional detail is specified, activity counts attributed to Alphabet open source contributors will include our full-time employees as well as our extended Alphabet community (temps, vendors, contractors, and interns).
• Active counts: Where possible, we will show ‘active users’ defined by logged activity within a specified timeframe (i.e. in month, year, etc) and ‘active repositories’ as those that have not been archived.
• Activity types: This year we explore GitHub activity types in more detail. Note that in some cases we have removed “Watch Events” or articulated this as passive engagement. Additionally, GitHub added an event type “PullRequestReviewEvent” that started logging activity in August 2020, but we chose to remove this from our charts and aggregate counts as it invalidates year over year comparisons.

By Sophia Vargas, Research Analyst – Google Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 2020 Statistics: Part 2

With the program nearing the end of the summer, it’s time for another round of updates!

Universities

The 1,198 students accepted into the GSoC 2020 program came from 550 universities, of which, 114 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2020:

University	# of Accepted Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	48
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	27
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad	24
National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal	23
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	13
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi	11
University of Moratuwa	11
National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur	10
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus	10
University of Tokyo	10
University Of Colombo School Of Computing (UCSC)	10

Mentors

Each year we pore over gobs of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2020 crew:

• Registered mentors: 3,592
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 2,156
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 78
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 199
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 533 (24.7%)
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 405 (18.8%)
• Percentage of new mentors: 34.18%

GSoC 2020 had an international representation with mentors from 67 countries around the world!

The global pandemic, COVID-19, brought additional challenges to this year’s GSoC program. Whether living with the virus, adjusting to shifting school and work schedules, or pivoting to a remote lifestyle, students and mentors have had to prioritize their safety and delicately balance their new way of life. Despite these unprecedented times, our students continue to push on and our mentors fully support our students by sharing their passion for open source, listening to their concerns and providing them with valuable advice. For that commitment, we would like to acknowledge and give thanks to all students and mentors in the GSoC 2020 program. Not even a pandemic can dampen your enthusiasm and tireless contributions to the open source community!

By Stephanie Taylor – Program Manager, Google Open Source Programs Office

Open source by the numbers at Google

At Google, open source is at the core of our infrastructure, processes, and culture. As such, participation in these communities is vital to our productivity. Within OSPO (Open Source Programs Office), our mission is to bring the value of open source to Google and the resources of Google to open source. To ensure our actions match our commitment, in this post we will explore a variety of metrics intended to increase context, transparency, and accountability across all of the communities we engage with.

Why we contribute: Open source has become a pervasive component in modern software development, and Google is no exception. We use thousands of open source projects across our internal infrastructure and products. As participants in the ecosystem, our intentions are twofold: give back to the communities we depend on as well as expand support for open source overall. We firmly believe in open source and its ability to bring together users, contributors, and companies alike to deliver better software.

The majority of Google’s open source work is done within one of two hosting platforms: GitHub and git-on-borg, Google’s production Git service which integrates with Gerrit for code review and access control. While we also allow individual usage of Bitbucket, GitLab, Launchpad, and other platforms, this analysis will focus on GitHub and git-on-borg. We will continue to explore how best to incorporate activity across additional channels.

A little context about the numbers you’ll read below:

• Business and personal: While git-on-borg hosts both internal and external Google created repos, GitHub is a mixture of Google projects, experimental efforts and personal projects created by Googlers.
• Driven by humans: We have created many automated bots and systems that can propose changes on both hosting platforms. We have intentionally filtered these data to ensure we are only showing human initiated activities.
• GitHub data: We are using GH Archive as the primary source for GitHub data, which is currently available as a public dataset on BigQuery. Google activity within GitHub is identified by self registered accounts, which we anticipate under reports actual usage as employees acclimate to our policies.
• Active counts: Where possible, we will show ‘active users’ and ‘active repositories’ defined by logged activity within each specified timeframe (for GH archive data, that’s any event type logged in the public GitHub event stream).

As numbers mean nothing without scale, let’s start by defining our applicable community: In 2019, more than 9% of Alphabet’s full time employees actively contributed to public repositories on git-on-borg and GitHub. While single digit, this percentage represents a portion of all full time Alphabet employees—from engineers to marketers to admins, across every business unit in Alphabet—and does not include those who contribute to open source projects outside of code. As our population has grown, so has our registered contributor base:

This chart shows the aggregate per year counts of Googlers active on public repositories hosted on GitHub and git-on-borg

What we create: As mentioned above, our contributing population works across a variety of Google, personal, and external repositories. Over the years, Google has released thousands of open source projects (many of which span multiple repositories) and ~2,600 are still active. Today, Google hosts over 8,000 public repositories on GitHub and more than 1,000 public repositories on git-on-borg. Over the last five years, we have doubled the number of public repos, growing our footprint by an average of 25% per year.

What we work on: In addition to our own repositories, we contribute to a wide pool of external projects. In 2019, Googlers were active in over 70,000 repositories on GitHub, pushing commits and/or opening pull requests on over 40,000 repositories. Note that more than 75% of the repos with Googler-opened pull requests were outside of Google-managed organizations (on GitHub).

This charts shows per year counts of activities initiated by Googlers on GitHub

What we contribute: For contribution volume on GitHub, we chose to focus on push events, opened, and merged pull requests instead of commits as this metric on its own is difficult to contextualize. Note that push events and pull requests typically include one or more commits per event. In 2019, Googlers created over 570,000 issues comments, opened over 150,000 pull requests, and created more than 36,000 push events on GitHub. Since 2015, we have doubled our annual counts of issues created and push events, and more than tripled the number of opened pull requests. Over the last five years, more than 80% of pull requests opened by Googlers have been closed and merged into active repositories.

How we spend our time: Combining these two classes of metrics—contributions and repos—provides context on how our contributors focus their time. On GitHub: in 2015, about 40% of our opened pull requests were concentrated in just 25 repositories. However, over the next four years, our activity became more distributed across a larger set of projects, with the top 25 repos claiming about 20% of opened pull requests in 2019. For us, this indicates a healthy expansion and diversification of interests, especially given that this activity represents both Google, as well as a community of contributors that happen to work at Google.

This chart splits the total per year counts of Googler created pull requests on GitHub by Top 25 repos vs the remainder ranked by number of opened pull requests per repo per year.

Open source contribution is about more than code

Every day, Google relies on the health and continuing availability of open source, and as such we actively invest in the security and sustainability of open source and its supply chain in three key areas:

• Security: In addition to building security projects like OpenTitan and gVisor, Google’s OSS-Fuzz project aims to help other projects identify programming errors in software. As of the end of 2019, OSS-Fuzz had over 250 projects using the project, filed over 16,000 bugs, including 3,500 security vulnerabilities.
• Community: Open source projects depend on communities of diverse individuals. We are committed to improving community sustainability and growth with programs like Google Summer of Code and Season of Docs. Over the last 15 years, about 15,000 students from over 105 countries have participated in Google Summer of Code, along with 25,000 mentors in more than 115 countries working on more than 680 open source projects.
• Research: At the end of 2019, Google invested $1 million in open source research, partnering with researchers at UVM, with the goal to deepen understanding of how people, teams and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, especially in open-source projects and communities.

Learn more about our open source initiatives at opensource.google.

By Sophia Vargas – Researcher, Google Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 2019 (Statistics Part 2)

2019 has been an epic year for Google Summer of Code as we celebrated 15 years of connecting university students from around the globe with 201 open source organizations big and small.

We want to congratulate our 1,134 students that complete GSoC 2019. Great work everyone!

Now that GSoC 2019 is over we would like to wrap up the program with some more statistics to round out the year.

Student Registrations

We had 30,922 students from 148 countries register for GSoC 2019 (that’s a 19.5% increase in registrations over last year, the previous record). Interest in GSoC clearly continues to grow and we’re excited to see it growing in all parts of the world.

For the first time ever we had students register from Bhutan, Fiji, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan, and Swaziland.

Universities

The 1,276 students accepted into the GSoC 2019 program hailed from 6586 universities, of which, 164 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2019:

University	# of Accepted Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	48
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	29
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	27
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIPU Dwarka)	20
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	19
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	19
Amrita University / Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	14
Delhi Technological University	11
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	11
Indraprastha Institute of Information and Technology, New Delhi	11

Mentors

Each year we pore over gobs of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2019 crew:

• Registered mentors: 2,815
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 2,066
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 70
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 307
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 691
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 498
• Percentage of new mentors: 35.84%

GSoC 2019 mentors are from all parts of the world, representing 81 countries!

Every year thousands of GSoC mentors help introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development—for that we are forever grateful. We can not stress enough that without our invaluable mentors the GSoC program would not exist. Mentorship is why GSoC has remained strong for 15 years, the relationships built between students and mentors have helped sustain the program and many of these communities. Sharing their passion for open source, our mentors have paved the road for generations of contributors to enter open source development.

Thank you to all of our mentors, organization administrators, and all of the “unofficial” mentors that help in our open source organization’s communities. Google Summer of Code is a community effort and we appreciate each and every one of you.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Reflecting on Google Code-in 2018

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last December with impressive numbers: 3,124 students from 77 countries completed an impressive 15,323 tasks!

These students spent 7 weeks working online with 27 open source organizations. They wrote code, wrote and edited documentation, designed UI elements and logos, and conducted research. Additionally, they developed videos to teach others about open source software, as well as found (and fixed!) hundreds of bugs.

Overview

• 2,164 students completed three or more tasks (earning a Google Code-in 2018 t-shirt)
• 17% of students were girls
• 79% of students were first time participants in GCI
• We saw very large increases in the number of students from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan

Student Age

Participating Schools

Students from 1,673 schools competed in this year’s contest. Many students learn about GCI from their friends or teachers and continue to spread the word to their classmates. This year the 5 schools with the most students completing tasks in the contest were:

School Name	Number of Student Participants	Country
Dunman High School	110	Singapore
Indus E.M High School	73	India
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	69	India
Amity International School Sec-46 Gurgaon	36	India
Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan Vidyashram Pratap Nagar	27	India

Countries

This year we welcome winners and finalists from 77 countries, including 9 "first time" countries; Georgia, Macedonia, Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Israel, Luxembourg, Nepal and Pakistan.

The chart below displays the 10 countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

What's Next

In June we will welcome all 54 grand prize winners to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the exciting world of open source software.

Thank you again to the people who make this program possible: the 789 mentors from 57 countries that guided students through the program and welcomed them into their open source communities.

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

Magnificent mentors of Google Summer of Code 2018

Mentors are the heart and soul of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and have been for the last 14 years. Without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code. These volunteers spend 4+ months guiding their students to create the best quality project possible while welcoming them into their communities – answering questions and providing help at all hours of the day, including weekends and holidays.

Thank you mentors and organization administrators! 

Each year we pore over heaps of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2018 crew:

• Registered mentors: 2,819
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 1,996
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 46
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 272
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 627
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 474
• Percentage of new mentors: 36.5%

GSoC 2018 mentors are from all parts of the world, hailing from 75 countries!

If you want to see the stats for all 75 countries check out this list.

Another fun fact about our 2018 mentors: they range in age from 15-80 years old!

• Average mentor age: 34
• Median mentor age: 33
• Mentors under 18 years old: 26*

GSoC mentors help introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development – for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 206 participating organizations to attend our annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of community building, lively debate, learning best practices from one another, working to strengthen open source communities, good food, and lots and lots of chocolate.

Thank you to all of our mentors, organization administrators, and all of the “unofficial” mentors that help in the various open source organization’s communities. Google Summer of Code is a community effort and we appreciate each and every one of you.

Cheers to yet another great year!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

* Most of these 26 young GSoC mentors started their journey in Google Code-in, our contest for 13-17 year olds that introduces young students to open source software development.

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 2

Now that Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018 is underway and students are wrapping up their first month of coding, we wanted to bring you some more statistics on the 2018 program. Lots and lots of numbers follow:

Organizations

Students are working with 206 organizations (the most we’ve ever had!), 41 of which are participating in GSoC for the first time.

Student Registrations

25,873 students from 147 countries registered for the program, which is a 25.3% increase over the previous high for the program back in 2017. There are 9 new countries with students registering for the first time: Angola, Bahamas, Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Kosovo, Maldives, and Mali.

Project Proposals

5,199 students from 101 countries submitted a total of 7,209 project proposals. 70.5% of the students submitted 1 proposal, 18.1% submitted 2 proposals, and 11.4% submitted 3 proposals (the max allowed).

Gender Breakdown

11.63% of accepted students are women. We are always working toward making our programs and open source more inclusive, and we collaborate with organizations and communities that help us improve every year.

Universities

The 1,268 students accepted into the GSoC 2018 program hailed from 613 universities, of which 216 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2018:

University	Country	Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	India	35
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	32
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	23
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	22
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	18
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	India	16
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	16
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna	India	14
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	India	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi	India	11
Indraprastha Institute of Information and Technology, New Dehli	India	11
University of Buea	Cameroon	11
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus	India	11

Another post with stats on our awesome GSoC mentors will be coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 1

Since 2005, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been bringing new developers into the open source community every year. This year we accepted 1,264 students from 62 countries into the 2018 GSoC program to work with a record 206 open source organizations this summer.

Students are currently participating in the Community Bonding phase of the program where they become familiar with the open source projects they will be working with. They also spend time learning the codebase and the community’s best practices so they can start their 12 week coding projects on May 14th.

Each year we like to share program statistics about the GSoC program and the accepted students and mentors involved in the program. Here are a few stats:

• 88.2% of the accepted students are participating in their first GSoC
• 74.4% of the students are first time applicants

Degrees

• 76.18% of accepted students are undergraduates, 17.5% are masters students, and 6.3% are getting their PhDs.
• 73% are Computer Science majors, 4.2% are mathematics majors, 17% are other engineering majors (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc.)
• We have students in a variety of majors including neuroscience, linguistics, typography, and music technologies.

Countries

This year there are four students that are the first to be accepted into GSoC from their home countries of Kosovo (three students) and Senegal. A complete list of accepted students and their countries is below:

Country	Students		Country	Students		Country	Students
Argentina	5		Hungary	7		Russian Federation	35
Australia	10		India	605		Senegal	1
Austria	14		Indonesia	3		Serbia	1
Bangladesh	3		Ireland	1		Singapore	8
Belarus	3		Israel	2		Slovak Republic	2
Belgium	3		Italy	24		South Africa	1
Brazil	19		Japan	7		South Korea	2
Bulgaria	2		Kosovo	3		Spain	21
Cameroon	14		Latvia	1		Sri Lanka	41
Canada	31		Lithuania	5		Sweden	6
China	52		Malaysia	2		Switzerland	5
Croatia	3		Mauritius	1		Taiwan	3
Czech Republic	4		Mexico	4		Trinidad and Tobago	1
Denmark	1		Morocco	2		Turkey	8
Ecuador	4		Nepal	1		Uganda	1
Egypt	12		Netherlands	6		Ukraine	6
Finland	3		Nigeria	6		United Kingdom	28
France	22		Pakistan	5		United States	104
Germany	53		Poland	3		Venezuela	1
Greece	16		Portugal	10		Vietnam	4
Hong Kong	3		Romania	10

There were a record number of students submitting proposals for the program this year -- 5,199 students from 101 countries.

In our next GSoC statistics post we will delve deeper into the schools, gender breakdown, mentors, and registration numbers for the 2018 program.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Code-in 2017: more is merrier!

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last month with jaw-dropping numbers: 3,555 students from 78 countries completed an impressive 16,468 tasks! That’s 265% more students than last year - the previous high during the 7 year contest!

These students spent 7 weeks working online with 25 open source organizations, writing code, writing and editing documentation, designing UI elements and logos, conducting research, developing videos teaching others about open source software, as well as finding (and fixing!) hundreds of bugs.

General Statistics

• 65.9% of students completed three or more tasks (earning a Google Code-in 2017 t-shirt)
• 17% of students were girls
• 27% of the participants from the USA were girls
• 91% of the students were first time participants

Student Age

Participating Schools

Students from 2,060 schools competed in this year’s contest. Many students learn about GCI from their friends or teachers and continue to spread the word to their classmates. This year the 5 schools with the most students completing tasks in the contest were:

School Name	Number of Student Participants	Country
Dunman High School	140	Singapore
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	43	India
Indus E.M High School	27	India
Jayshree Periwal International School	25	India
Union County Magnet High School	18	United States

Countries

We are pleased to have 7 new countries participating in GCI this year: Bolivia, Botswana, Guinea, Guyana, Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, and Morocco! The chart below displays the ten countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

In June we will welcome all 50 grand prize winners to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco. 

Keep an eye on the Google Open Source Blog in the coming weeks for posts from mentoring organizations describing their experience and the work done by students.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the world of open source software development. 

Thank you again to the heroes of this program: the 704 mentors from 62 countries that guided students through the program and welcomed them into their open source communities.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Team

Google Code-in is breaking records

It’s been an incredible (and incredibly busy!) three weeks for the 25 mentor organizations participating in Google Code-in (GCI) 2017, our seven week global contest designed to introduce teens to open source software development. Participants complete bite sized “tasks” in topics that include coding, documentation, UI/UX, quality assurance and more. Volunteer mentors from each open source project help participants along the way.

Total registered students has already surpassed 2016 numbers and we are less than halfway to the finish! We’re thrilled that high school students are embracing GCI like never before.

Check out some of the statistics below (current as of Thursday, December 14):

• Total registered students: 6,146
• Number of students who have completed at least one task: 1,573 (51% of those students have completed more than 3 tasks, earning them a GCI t-shirt)
• Total number of tasks completed: 5,499
• Most tasks completed by one student: 39

Top 5 Countries by Tasks Completed

Countries Represented by Mentors and Students

Of course, GCI wouldn’t be possible without the effort of the more than 725 mentors and organization administrators. Based in 65 countries, mentors answer questions, review submissions, and approve tasks for students at all hours of the day -- and sometimes night! They work tirelessly to help encourage and guide the next generation of open source contributors.

Every year we express our gratitude to the mentors and organization administrators. We are particularly grateful for them given how many more students are participating in GCI this year. Thank you all, and hang in there!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

The Mentors of Google Summer of Code 2017

Mentors are the bread and butter of our program - without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code (GSoC). These volunteers spend 12 weeks (plus a month of community bonding) tirelessly guiding their students to create the best quality project possible and welcoming them into their communities - answering questions and providing help at all hours.

Each year we pore over oodles of data to extract the most interesting and relevant statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick snapshot of our 2017 group:

• Total mentors: 3,439
• Mentors assigned to an active project: 1,647
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC over 10 years: 22
• Percentage of new mentors: 49%

GSoC 2017 mentors are a worldly group, hailing from 69 countries on 6 continents - we’re still waiting on a mentor from Antarctica… Anyone?

Interested in the data? Check out the full list of countries.

Some interesting factoids about our mentors:

• Average age: 39
• Youngest: 15*
• Oldest: 68
• Most common first name: Michael (there are 40!)

GSoC mentors help to introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development — for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 201 participating organizations to attend the annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of food, community building, lively debate and lots of fun.

Thank you to everyone involved in Google Summer of Code. Cheers to yet another great year!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

* Say what? 15 years old!? Yep! We had 12 GSoC mentors under the age of 18. This group of enthusiastic teens started their journey in our sister program, Google Code-in, an open source coding competition for 13-17 year olds. You can read more about it at g.co/gci.

Google Summer of Code 2017 statistics part 2

Now that Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2017 is under way with students in their first full week of the coding period we wanted to bring you some more statistics on the 2017 program. Lots and lots of numbers follow:

Organizations

Students are working with 201 organizations (the most we’ve ever had!) of which 39 are participating in GSoC for the first time.

Student Registrations

Over 20,651 students from 144 countries registered for the program, which is an 8.8% increase over the previous high for the program.

Project Proposals

4,764 students from 108 countries submitted a total of 7,089 project proposals.

Gender breakdown

11.4% of accepted students are women. We are always interested in making our programs and open source more inclusive. Please contact us if you know of organizations we should work with to spread the word about GSoC to underrepresented groups.

Universities

The 1,318 students accepted into the GSoC 2017 program hailed from 575 universities, of which 142 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Top 10 schools by students accepted for GSoC 2017 

University Name	Country	Accepted Students
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad	India	39
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	37
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	31
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	24
Delhi Technological University	India	23
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa Campus	India	18
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	India	18
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	India	15
LNM Institute of Information Technology	India	15
TU Munich/Technische Universität München	Germany	14

Another post with stats on our GSoC mentors will be coming soon!

Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2017 statistics part 1

Since 2005 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been bringing new developers into the open source community every year. GSoC 2017 is the largest to date with 1,318 students from 72 countries accepted into the program who are working with a record 201 open source organizations this summer.

Students are currently participating in the Community Bonding phase of the program where they become familiar with the open source communities they will be working with. They also spend time learning the codebase and the community’s best practices so they can start their 12 week coding projects on May 30th.

Each year we like to share program statistics as we see GSoC continue to expand all over the world. This year there are three students that are the first to be accepted into GSoC from their home countries: Qatar, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe. A complete list of accepted students and their countries is below:

Country	Students	Country	Students	Country	Students
Argentina	3	Ghana	1	Qatar	1
Armenia	1	Greece	29	Romania	11
Australia	6	Hungary	6	Russian Federation	54
Austria	13	India	569	Saudi Arabia	1
Bangladesh	2	Indonesia	2	Serbia	3
Belarus	3	Ireland	5	Singapore	10
Belgium	6	Israel	2	Slovak Republic	6
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1	Italy	23	Slovenia	2
Brazil	21	Jamaica	1	South Africa	2
Bulgaria	4	Japan	13	South Korea	8
Cameroon	8	Kazakhstan	1	Spain	19
Canada	27	Kenya	1	Sri Lanka	54
China	49	Latvia	1	Sweden	8
Colombia	1	Lithuania	2	Switzerland	5
Costa Rica	1	Macedonia	1	Taiwan	1
Croatia	1	Mexico	1	Tajikistan	1
Czech Republic	6	Moldova	1	Turkey	11
Denmark	2	Netherlands	14	Ukraine	12
Ecuador	2	New Zealand	1	United Arab Emirates	1
Egypt	10	Nigeria	1	United Kingdom	16
Estonia	1	Pakistan	8	United States	126
Finland	4	Peru	1	Uruguay	1
France	20	Poland	19	Vietnam	4
Germany	55	Portugal	10	Zimbabwe	1

In our next GSoC statistics post we will delve deeper into the schools, gender breakdown, mentors and registration numbers for the 2017 program.

Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Code-in 2016: even more young developers

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last month with our largest contest to date: 1,340 students from 62 countries completed an impressive 6,379 tasks! Working with 17 open source organizations, students wrote code, created and edited documentation, designed UI elements and logos, conducted research, developed screencasts and videos teaching others about open source software, and helped find (and fix!) hundreds of bugs.

General statistics

• 56.4% of students completed three or more tasks (earning themselves a fun Google Code-in 2016 t-shirt)
• 21% of students were female
• 30% of the participants from the USA were female
• This was the first Google Code-in for 1,143 students (85.3%)

Student age

Participating schools

Students from 550 schools competed in this year’s contest. While Google Code-in is a program for individuals, every year some schools emerge as hot spots of participation. This year, these five schools had the most students taking part:

School Name	Country	Number of Participants
Dunman High School	Singapore	185
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	India	29
Jayshree Periwal International School	India	26
Colegiul National Aurel Vlaicu	Romania	23
Ly Tu Trong Specialized High Schools	Vietnam	14

Countries

We are pleased to have a new country participating in GCI this year: Mauritius! The chart below displays the ten countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.




In June we will welcome all 34 grand prize winners (along with a mentor from each participating organization) for a fun-filled trip to the Bay Area. The trip will include meeting with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco.

Keep an eye on the Google Open Source Blog in coming weeks for more stats on Google Code-in 2016, plus posts from the mentoring organizations describing some of their experiences with the contests and the work done by “their” students.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the world of open source software development.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

Taking the pulse of Google Code-in 2016

Today is the official midpoint of this year’s Google Code-in contest and we are delighted to announce this is our most popular year ever! 930 teenagers from 60 countries have completed 3,503 tasks with 17 open source organizations. The number of students successfully completing tasks has almost met the total number of students from the 2015 contest already.

Tasks that the students have completed include:

• writing test suites
• improving mobile UI 
• writing documentation and creating videos to help new users 
• working on internationalization efforts
• fixing and finding bugs in the organization's’ software 

Participants from all over the world
In total, over 2,800 students from 87 countries have registered for the contest and we look forward to seeing great work from these (and more!) students over the next few weeks. 2016 has also seen a huge increase in student participation in places such as Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Google Code-in participants by country

Please welcome two new countries to the GCI family: Mauritius and Moldova! Mauritius made a very strong debut to the contest and currently has 13 registered students who have completed 31 tasks.

The top five countries with the most completed tasks are:

1. India: 982
2. United States: 801
3. Singapore: 202
4. Vietnam: 119
5. Canada: 117

Students, there is still plenty of time to get started with Google Code-in. New tasks are being added daily to the contest site — there are over 1,500 tasks available for students to choose from right now! If you don’t see something that interests you today, check back again every couple of days for new tasks.

The last day to register for the contest and claim a task is Friday, January 13, 2017 with all work being due on Monday, January 16, 2017 at 9:00 am PT.

Good luck to all of the students participating this year in Google Code-in!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

All numbers reported as of 8:00 PM Pacific Time, December 22, 2016.