Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source, Google, Inc.
Leslie Hawthorn is a Program Manager for Google’s Open Source Programs Office, where she’s the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code program. She also conceived and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world’s first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie serves on the Advisory Board of the GNOME Foundation and the Open Source Business Resource. She also serves on the Steering Committee for the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Project .
Prior to joining Google, Leslie got her feet wet in Silicon Valley high tech at a small communications semiconductor startup, where she worked in Marketing and Public Relations. She holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley and her personal website is http://www.hawthornlandings.org or you can find her on identi.ca (@lh) and Twitter (@lhawthorn).
Get Them While They're Even Younger: Google' Programming Contest for Pre-University Students
Back in 2007, Leslie Hawthorn had a wild idea. Why not take all the lessons learned from the Google Summer of Code program and her interactions with FLOSS developers worldwide and create an offering for students who hadn't hit college yet? Thinking of software development as a holistic process, she conceived the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world's first initiative to introduce pre-university students to all aspects of Open Source development, from documentation to user experience research to fixing bugs. In this talk, Leslie will discuss some of the reasons why the GHOP contest was created, lessons learned by her and her incredibly dedicated co-hort of mentors from ten Free and Open Source software projects. She'll also talk a bit more about future plans for the effort, which is on track to be reprised in December 2009.
