If you’re 13 years of age or older and enrolled in a pre-university (e.g. high school or secondary school) educational institution, you can join the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and get a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to the Googleplex, Google’s Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA.

Google recently launched the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, or GHOP for short, following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program. GHOP is intented to students and offers each contestant an opportunity to get involved in the Open Source community. It is also the aim of GHOP to encourage young people to
engage in such open source projects at an early time.

It’s Google’s not so secret hope that the student contestants of today will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the future.

The participating open source projects gain the benefit of additional contributions to their project, often in important areas that may get overlooked for whatever reason.

There are ten (10) participating Open Source projects in the GHOP. Contestants are asked to select and decide which open source project(s) are doing work that is interesting to them, and complete a pre-defined task of their choice. Continue reading →