Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in their newest endeavour to promote open source in the general public. Google Highly-Open-Participation Contest is a new programme that follows on from the success of Summer of Code. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc). As for Drupal, the project has been allowed exactly 102 tasks (Where do they get that number from?). So far, 27 out of 47 open tasks have already been claimed, in less than 48 hours. It's great to see large-scale efforts like this giving open source the public exposure it needs and deserves. Hopefully google will come up with a better name for next year's programme! Participating students must complete 3 tasks of approximately 2 to 5 days each in order to claim $100 and a T-Shirt. Students can continue completing tasks up to a total of $500.

I wanna go back to school!