Google Announces Open Source Contest

Attempting to build on the success of their summer program, the Google Summer of Code, Google has announced another effort to entice young people into greater open source development.

The Google Highly Open ParticipationTM Contest seeks to encourage young people to participate in open source. Google is working with ten open source organizations that have provided a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can include supporting a current project, working on debugging a particular program, writing documentation, and even doing some user experience research.

Assessment of the student work is rather simple. Essentially, a student is deemed successful when a task is complete. If the specified work on a task is accepted, the task is then closed to other contestants. Should the work need polishing, the organization will give a student guidance on how to improve the work. If the task does not meet expectations, then the task may be reopened for another student to begin working on.

The contest is open to students who are 13 or older but not yet involved in post-secondary education (University level studies). Not only do winners get a coveted contest prize T-shirt for completing a task, Google has cash prizes as well.

Certificates will also be awarded for the completion of at least one task and 100 USD will be given out for every three tasks completed (maximum 500 USD per contestant). Additionally, there will be ten grand prize winners who will receive a trip to Google’s Mountain View, California, USA Headquarters.

Participating Open Source Projects in the Google contest involve Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe. Students under the age of 18 will need parental permission to participate.