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The Google Highly Open Participation Contest
Announcement: November 28, 2007 *Google announces first open source contest for pre-university students * Who doesn't love a contest? We certainly do. Google believes strongly in students having opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math, and today at the Open Source Developers' Conference in Brisbane, Australia we're pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest to help introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development. Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensource to write code and documentation, prepare training materials, conduct user-experience research, and win prizes -- t-shirts, cash, or, for ten grand-prize winners, a chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca. For the past three years college students have participated in Google Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) with great results: hundreds of college students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people across the globe have begun development together, and millions of lines of open code have been produced. As we thought about what we could do to help encourage students before university and build a pipeline of future talent, we developed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest -- the first contest from our open source team exclusively for secondary school and high school students. Google will work with ten open source organizations -- Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS -- for this pilot effort, each of which will provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants. Tasks typically fall into the following categories: code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface, so there should be something for everyone, and parents and educators can help by sharing this opportunity with their children and students. The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet begun university studies, and contestants will be able to claim tasks until 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time on January 22, 2008. We hope that students who participate will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the future, and we look forward to announcing the grand-prize winners on February 11. For more information, please visit http://code.google.com (Log in to post comments)
PRE-university students Posted Nov 28, 2007 17:30 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] What's intriguing here is that this is for PRE-university students.
Unpaid underage workers Posted Nov 28, 2007 18:34 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] What's intriguing here is that they are asking people to work for them for free. At least the "Summer of Code" participants got paid, didn't they?
Unpaid underage workers Posted Nov 28, 2007 23:08 UTC (Wed) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link] it's a contest, no different than the kind that requires students to write an essay or create some form of art (drawing, painting, etc). the prizes (from http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/rules.html, sections 8 & 9): - t-shirt for each "completed entry" - $100 for every three "completed entries" (not to exceed $500) - trip to google headquarters
PRE-university students Posted Nov 28, 2007 20:50 UTC (Wed) by timbury (guest, #49326) [Link] Aren't there any child labor laws governing this contest? But, really, it is a good opportunity for a young person to get involved in something positive besides sports, eh? I mean, no one pays high school athletes although pros make millions.
The Google Highly Open Participation Contest Posted Nov 28, 2007 20:58 UTC (Wed) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] Child have to work for free, while Google won't release any software as open source? Where is the Don't-be-evil slogan going?
volunteer service projects for high-school students are commonplace Posted Nov 28, 2007 22:07 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Don't be silly. This is the equivalent of an after-school volunteer service project like planting trees or cleaning up park-land or cooking meals for homeless people, all of which are commonly done for no pay by high-school students. The students are not working on Google products, they are working on free/open-source software that is available to the public at no charge and with few or no strings...and at the same time they are potentially gaining practical job experience.(Not to mention that there are plenty of companies that offer internship programs for high-school students. People worried about child-labor laws seem to be on the wrong track here; any big company like Google is not going to have a problem knowing what the law is and complying with it.)
The Google Highly Open Participation Contest Posted Nov 29, 2007 1:38 UTC (Thu) by thoffman (subscriber, #3063) [Link] Don't be ridiculous. Google releases lots of software as open source. This week's LWN even mentioned a new one, look for "Goopackage" on the Development page and you'll find this: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=758815 And surely you've seen http://code.google.com/opensource/ ?
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