Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Help Wanted: Open Source for Secondary Schoolers

While this news isn't strictly related to Summer of Code, we felt the community would like to hear about our newest initiative to introduce students to open source development: the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. The contest offers pre-university students the opportunity to contribute code, documentation, localization, testing and more to our ten participating open source projects. In return, our contestants have the chance to win cash prizes, a trip to the Googleplex and the all important t-shirt.

If you'd like to help us with this pilot endeavor, we would love to have you. Since many Summer of Coders were recently new to open source themselves, you are in a perfect position to provide sage advice and a helping hand to our contestants on the contest mailing list. If you're particularly passionate about one of the participating open source projects, why not suggest tasks for student participants to complete? Each project has published guidelines on how to contribute tasks for your reference.

We hope all of you are as excited about the contest as we are, and we hope to have your help in getting these new contributors up to speed. See you on the mailing list!

15 comments:

Unknown said...

Only 10 projects :( I'm especially missing KDE for example.

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ smrtskoso: We felt is was best to start small and make sure we did things right. If things go well, we'll look at expanding the breadth of the contest.

Anonymous said...

@ Leslie: Congrats to you and other guys at Google for the great work! I'm really enjoying this contest.

Anonymous said...

Is it possible for other projects to be added as well ? My project would be very interetsted in offering tasks for participants of the contest.

Otherwise than that I wish you success on the contest with many participant!

Fredo said...

Great idea, Google, as always! Maybe next year you'll make it a bit more internship-oriented, or at least give us those volunteer hours high schoolers need to graduate.
Still, I hope this project great success.

Tyler Menezes said...

@Reinhard: Has to be OSI Certified, I believe. And you're not going to get in this year - the contest already started.

Venkatesh Nandakumar said...

Are Under-graduate Students Eligible??
I'm pursuing My B.Tech Degree From IIT Roorkee, India

mgsloan said...

Great idea! I look forward to participating - @leslie, you may remember me from that pseudo-SoC with Raph.

I do find it strange that 6 of the projects are essentially Content Management Systems (most of them explicitly say this). I'd prefer a bit more diversity. OLPC would be an amazing project, for example. Maybe next year (though I won't be able to participate..).

Looks like it's off to a good start - tasks are being taken on at a rather alarming rate :)

Wojtek Szkutnik said...

The idea is great...
if only the submissions could be rated a bit faster... :)

Nicolai Spohrer said...

This is really neat. You do so much for Open Source!

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ smrtskoso: I blame jetlag for not mentioning this earlier, but if you're looking for something to do that's KDE and Google related, why not come to their 4.0 release party? We're hosting it at Google HQ in January.

@ giangy: Thanks for your kind words. We're happy to have you with us.

@ reinhard: The contest has already started, but keep your eye on the discussion list. Should we choose to expand the contest in the future, we'd announce it on list.

@ fredo: If you're looking to get credit from your school for volunteer hours contributing to open source, I am sure many projects would be willing to provide you with a letter that may prove you've fulfilled the requirements. As for GHOP, though, since there is compensation involved (prizes), I'm not sure participation would count.

Thank you for your well-wishes!

@ venkatesh nandakumar: No, you have to be a pre-university student. Please see the FAQ for more details.

@ mgsloan: Hi there - nice to hear from you! CMS's have a lower barrier to entry, which we figured would make them a good choice for less experienced contributors. We hope to expand this effort over time, but wanted to make sure we worked the bugs out (and proved the concept).

@ wojciech szkutnik: Thanks for the kind words. Please have a wee bit of patience. There are many more contestants than there are folks administering it. If you've waited more than a couple of days for review, try asking for review in the project's specified communication channels (e.g. their mailing list or on IRC).

@ kopfgeldjaeger: Thank you. We're very excited to be contributing back to the community with this new initiative.

Dan Abramov said...

Thanks a lot!
At least something not too hard, not too easy.
Though I'd rather like to have more projects to choose from...

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ dan abramov: Glad you're stoked, too!

Folks, please keep in mind that this contest is a pilot. Much better to start small and get it right the first time, particularly since we knew we'd be working with less experienced contributors.

And that's the last time I'm going to say "patience please" in so many words. :)

Anonymous said...

hi! are we expecting a similar contest this year for 2008 ?? or does the contest from 2007 continue this year.. ??

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ bluemoon: We are definitely looking into holding GHOP again, but no news on when at this time.