Saturday, July 30, 2011

The 2011 ASoC Open Competition

We are so excited to launch the first ever ASoC Open Competition! The competition covers four different tracks: web development, mobile development, user interface design and graphics design. The theme is a mix of education and entrepreneurship. The minimal requirements are designed to ensure beginners get to practice the basic skills while allowing enough room for everybody to innovate. Read on for the details!

Web Development
There's always a next big thing on the web and you can be the one who make it happen! Use your favorite web technologies to build the website you always wanted. We encourage innovation in social interaction, politics and education. On the tech side, we need you to include: user authentication, persistent content and social features.

Mobile Development
It's just amazing how a single game can provide great entertainment whenever and wherever you like - who wouldn't pay for that?! And now you can do it, we know you always wanted to! We'd really like to see a cool 2D/3D game of multiple levels and a truly engaging gaming experience.

Web Interface Design
A good design is immediately appreciated by everybody, but only few know how to make one. We'd really like to get a new design for our ASoC blog! Show us some blog design art and make it real on your own Blogger blog. Needless to say, we'll be looking for compliance with web standards, usability and sheer coolness!

Graphics Design
The secret ingredient! Even the best software wouldn't look professional without some slick graphics thrown in. Businesses too, need logos and posters and ASoC is no exception! We need you guys to do your magic and show as how you imagine the new ASoC logo and/or ASoC Open poster should look like! Absolutely no restrictions on creativity!!!

The rules are so simple. Everyone in Egypt is welcome to join, both individuals and teams of any size. Just fill this form then move straight to the job! Use these dories to share your project ideas for web and mobile to see who's interested to join you and figure out what's hot and what's not! Further updates will be posted on the Facebook event page.

The competition starts today and ends on the last day of this summer vacation. Around midway, the competitors will be invited to pitch their project ideas, show us what they have so far and get feedback. The final submissions will be reviewed by a panel of industry professionals and the winners will be announced in a closing ceremony. Community feedback is also going to count, specially for the design tracks.

Enough said. Time to work!

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at ASoC.HR at gmail.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

ASoC'11 Phase-1 Now Underway!

Yesterday, we officially started the first phase of our program -after making it through the long list of applicants! We are trying hard to accommodate everybody and wish we don't disappoint!

We emailed a subset of our dear applicants to move on to the next step: create their teams and submit their resumes. We made sure we give the teams enough room to dream big and work towards making it real!

While we encourage the youth to go outside and come up with their own ideas, we are very willing to offer all the support and guidance we have! We've got a long long list of projects and are even working with our mentors on more tailored projects to suit the teams' interests and skill level!

So please take this chance to work on an idea, search for information, make it even better and watch out for competition! Even better, work on many ideas! Keep an eye on the market and know when to take your shot. It would be so cool if the teams were able to work on ideas of their own, but what really matters is your commitment. If you don't happen to have a rocking idea right now, we can understand that.

It is our mission to create something we can build upon for everybody. We will focus on this first phase for the next couple of weeks and try to get back to the rest of you as soon as we can. In the meanwhile, we know you will be working on your skills, sharpening your tools and getting ready for the hunt! We're sure we still have many soldiers on our side and our troops can't wait for your to join!

Give it all you got boys and girls! It's ALEX S-O-C!!!

Friday, July 15, 2011

Hello World from Alexandria!

Hello everybody! We're very happy to present the first local, Egyptian, Summer of Code, in Alexandria!

Inspired by the Google Summer of Code program, we created a local version to provide a unique opportunity for university students to work side by side with industry professionals on a wide variety of projects!

We realized the growing number of students who need to engage in serious development activities to complement their academic studies and confidently proceed to graduation.

Both the local market and universities are not able to provide this experience to the students at the required scale. Moreover, the nature of the local market may not encourage our students to develop certain skills which may keep these skills missing or outsourced. Our program is created just for this!

We invite alumni volunteers to give back to their community by mentoring student teams on the projects they want to work on. According to their interests, students and mentors are matched together with some screening on the mentors part. Hopefully by the end of this summer, we will be selecting some of the best projects and award some modest prizes!

So far, both students and mentors were asked to fill a preliminary survey to help estimate the scale we will be dealing with for our first year. As expected, the student's response was phenomenal while we got less mentors than we hoped for.

We are currently processing the long list of applications we received and will get back to our students asking them to create teams and send their own proposals! At the same time, we will be working with mentors on setting the plan for the summer and developing more cool project ideas!

That's all for now! Stay tuned for more updates soon and enjoy your summer!

Happy coding everybody!