Google has announced the “Google Highly Open Participation Contest,” a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development.
The contest, announced at the Open Source Developers Conference in Brisbane (Australia) aims to pick up where Google’s highly successful Summer of Code program finishes and comes complete with 10 “grand prizes” where winners get a trip to the Googleplex, and a variety of smaller prizes that includes cash and other incentives.
For the contest Google has joined forces with a variety of Open Source projects: The Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Each partner will provide a list of tasks the relevant project needs help with, including bug fixes, documentation and user experience research. Students claim ownership of a particular task and submit their work for assessment according to the instructions for each task. Work is then assessed against other contributions. The contest will assist development in the open source projects participating; a good thing for the many people who use these platforms, whilst the students gain experience in coding at a higher level.
The contest is now open and finishes January 22. Full details are available at the Google Highly Open Participation Contest page here.