The what now?

With the repeated success of the Google Summer of Code, Google has announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) for pre-university students involved in all aspects of open source development. Drupal has been chosen as one of the ten projects participating in the new pilot program, which means we need you!

So if you're aged 13-18, or know someone who is, come join in the fun of improving Drupal! Sign up for a drupal.org account, and join the Drupal GHOP Group. We are looking for all varieties of contribution, from development to bug fixing to writing documentation to doing user-experience research.

How does it work?

If you are age 13-18 (or know someone who is :)) and meet the eligibility requirements, head over to Drupal's GHOP Project Page and check out the list of available tasks. If you find any marked "Open" that appeal to you, respond to the task with the text, "I claim this Task."

Provided you were the first one to claim it, the task will then be marked "Claimed" and you'll have a period of 2-5 days to work on it. If your work meets the criteria, you'll receive credit and then can claim another task if you'd like!

Each project has a "mentor" associated with it, who will be your main contact for any questions you may have. Don't limit yourself to just one person, though. Everyone involved in Drupal GHOP can answer questions or offer advise where needed, so please speak up and engage the community!

The Official Contest Rules and FAQs from Google have a more detailed (and official!) discussion of how it works.

What's in it for me?

In addition to the real-world experience participating in an open source community (which will also look totally awesome on your college application), if you complete one task, you get a nifty t-shirt. If you complete 3 tasks, you receive a $100 USD prize. And you keep receiving $100 USD prizes for every 3 tasks that you complete, up to $500.

Finally, whoever is deemed the best overall entrant from each participating project will receive the "Grand Prize," which is a trip to Google's Headquarters in Mountainview, CA for them and their parent/guardian. Should be a blast! :)

What if I don't meet the eligibility requirements?

You can still help by proposing a new task. Check our page on how to write a good task for some guidelines. If approved, we'll go ahead and mark this task as "Open" so that students can claim it. We can have up to 102 tasks, so feel free to get creative. Are there itches you want scratched that would make a useful learning opportunity for a student, and could be accomplished in about a week? Propose 'em as tasks! Remember, these don't have to be limited to coding, but can also be around things like QA, usability, documentation, and so on.

How else can I help?

We need an army of cheerful, helpful folks to be present in #drupal-ghop on irc.freenode.net, and subscribed to the GHOP group at http://groups.drupal.org/ghop-2007 to answer student questions. Students will likely need help on everything from how to install Drupal to how the community process works to API-level questions, so *everyone* who has any free time, please sign up and help these students succeed. :)