The Google Summer of Code program has been a joint labor of love between Google and the open source community for the past three years, and the results have been spectacular: 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, 4 million last year alone. We've been particularly proud of this program and how much it has helped the community and we've spent a lot of time thinking about ways we can continue helping open source projects find even more contributors. Today, we're pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our new effort to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research.
While we're very excited about many aspects of the contest, the best part is that everyone can participate. Contestants must meet the eligibility requirements, but anyone interested in helping out can simply suggest a task to be included in the contest. Our contestants have a chance to win t-shirts, cash prizes, and a visit the Googleplex for a day of technical talks, delicious food and a photo with our very own Stan T. Rex.
Want to learn more? Check out the contest FAQs and tell your favorite pre-college students to pick a task or two to complete. You can always visit our discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.
Update: Fixed the broken links.
The links on this post don't seem to be working
ReplyDeleteTry:
ReplyDeletehttp://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/
Fixed. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Titus!
ReplyDeleteGreat news - Google's Open Source Programs Office rocks!
ReplyDeleteThanks to the Summer of Code 2006 I started developing for eclipse, was elected committer earlier this year and interned with Google in Santa Monica.
It's been a wonderful and educational adventure - great to learn that ever more students get the chance to be supported in open source development by Google.
It's a great opportunity for students in highschools to dive in open source software development. Even if they don't have programming skills they can always help by writing documentation, preparing presentations or testing software.
ReplyDeleteReally great idea, now even more students can feel the Open Source vibe and get new valuable experience :-)
I'm open to help.
Best,
Pawel Solyga
Finally! I remember being frustrated in 10th grade, when I happened upon Google Code to find that one of the requirements was having an age of 18+. Well, I'm extremely busy at this time of year, but I won't let this opportunity slip.
ReplyDeleteSo, you're paying teenagers to do the documentation, translation, and testing that "real" developers don't want to do?
ReplyDelete@weirdbro: It's not about the tasks that "real" developers don't want to do.
ReplyDeleteSelected Open Source projects are open for new tasks submissions from community. Nothing stops you to submit new task that involves some programming skills, you can even find that kind of tasks right now (writing a module, writing some apps in Mono and many more). The reason why this is more about documentation, translation, testing etc is because teenagers usually have less experience in coding and simpler tasks allows them to contribute to open source projects without programming skills.
Best,
Pawel Solyga
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ReplyDeleteI'm very disappointed: no haskell.org in available projects.
ReplyDelete@pierre: Leslie Hawthorn already answered similar question at GSoC blog: "We felt is was best to start small and make sure we did things right. If things go well, Google will look at expanding the breadth of the contest."
ReplyDeleteBest,
Pawel Solyga