Google’s Open Source Contest for pre-University Students

Google has announced the Highly Open Participation Contest. The announcement was made in Brisbane, Australia, at the Open Source Developers Conference, and it is intended to introduce pre-university (secondary school and high school) students to software development in the open source community. Google made a similar announcemnt last month to help spur application development for the Android Mobile platform.

This new contest is open to pre-university students older than 13 years, and will revolve around the following categories:

Code
Documentation
Research
Outreach
Quality Assurance
Training
Translation
User interface

Participants in the contest will receive their tasks through the following Open Source projects: Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Four of the ten listed (Plone, Joomla!, SilverStripe CMS, and Drupal) are very active Content Management Systems, and Moodle is an online classroom software. Participants will have until January 22, 2008 to claim their tasks.

Ten grand prize winners will be announced on February 11, 2008. Prospective participants may visit Google Highly Open Participation Contest for contest information.