All Teens do the GHOP

Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Really awkward name right?

Looks like Google really wants to inspire the next generation to be involved with open-source projects already. Opened exclusively to 13-18 year olds, 10 fantastic open source platforms (Joomla, Apache, GNOME, Moodle, among others) are allowing kids to get involved with various tasks to help the open source community.

Along with that are also prizes including a t-shirt (who doesn’t want a Google t-shirt), a certificate, $100s of dollars, and a special kid from each open course platform gets the chance to go visit the Googleplex to receive their award.

Our readers will know that we are getting excited over this. Although Google can be considered a monolith among the web companies, it is also one of the most friendly and innovative to work for. This is a great opportunity for all kids to consider and I highly recommend it. The tasks range from the program-heavy to some light documentation and video-making tasks.

I am probably going to help out Moodle with some tutorial-making tasks and Josh is taking on a huge task of upgrading a Joomla component. There are time limits and professional developments and the whole shibang so we hope this will be good experience as well as a huge chance for something more.

~Kevin X