Re: [school-discuss] The Google Highly Open Participation Contest

[Justin <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sean Carlson <seanc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Nov 28, 2007 12:36 AM
 Subject: Google announces first open source contest for pre-university students
To: info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Hi SchoolForge,

Thought the following news might be of interest to you:

Today at the Open Source Developers' Conference in Brisbane,
Australia, we announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest,
developed to help introduce secondary school and high school students
to open source software development and to encourage young people
through opportunities in the fields of science, technology,
engineering, and math.

I've included the announcement below, and you can find more
information at the following:

Google Highly Open Participation Contest:
 http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/

Google Code Blog post:
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-here-google-highly-open.html

 Thanks!
- Sean

Announcement:
November 28, 2007

Google announces first open source contest for pre-university students

Who doesn't love a contest?  We certainly do.  Google believes
strongly in students having opportunities in science, technology,
engineering, and math, and today we're pleased to announce the Google
Highly Open Participation Contest to help introduce secondary school
and high school students to open source software development.

Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/
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.

For the past three years college students have participated in Google
Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) 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.

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.  Tasks typically fall into the following
categories: code, documentation, research, outreach, quality
assurance, training, translation, and user interface, so there should
be something for everyone, and parents and educators can help by
sharing this opportunity with their children and students.

The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet
begun university studies, and contestants will be able to claim tasks
until 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time on January 22, 2008.  We hope that
students who participate will be long-term contributors to these and
other open source projects in the future, and we look forward to
announcing the grand-prize winners on February 11.

For more information, please visit http://code.google.com/opensource

-- 
Sean Carlson
Google  |  Global Communications & Public Affairs
seanc@xxxxxxxxxx  |  +1.650.253.1173  |  www.google.com


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