Although few detaills are yet available, from its initial announcement we learn that:

Google Code-in [is] Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. We are inviting students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year.

The list of participating organizations is due to be announced in early November and the tasks that students will be asked to do on their behalf include the following:

2. Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents

3. Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing

4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality

5. Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions

6. Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more

7. Translation: Tasks related to localization

8. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Information will be made available on the Google Open Source Blog