Google announces first open source contest

Contest aimed toward students to participate and write code, documentation, research and quality assurance

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, Google has announced the highly open participation contest to secondary school and high school students in open source software development.

For the past three years college students have participated in Google Summer of Code 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.

Students can visit 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.

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.