Leslie Hawthorn has just announced Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the OSDC open source conference in Australia. What is GHOP ? It’s a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, just like Google Summer of Code does for university students. Thanks to Google now even pre-university students can be involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research. It’s a great opportunity for students in highschools to dive in open source software development and get new valuable experience.

For the contest, Google selected 10 Open Source projects which you might work for: The Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Each of selected projects (mentoring organizations) will provide a list of tasks the relevant project needs help with. Students choose on which particular task they want to work on and submit their work according to the instructions for each task. Students are eligible to win cash prizes and nice GHOP t-shirts, grand prize winners will get a nice free trip to Googleplex in Mountain View :-)

The contest started today and finishes January 22.

Full details are available at the Google Highly Open Participation Contest page

Post at Google Summer of Code blog can be found here.

You can also check out the contest FAQs for some more information and visit GHOP discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.