The news is now out: Google is launching a new Google Summer of Code-like contest, the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP contest). We've been excited as soon as we got contacted to participate in this project since the goal is to put pre-university students in contact with free software, and have them contribute. And I'm really glad that it's not just about code, but about all types of contributions you can think of. There's a list of tasks that students can choose from, covering really everything. In this contest, a task is small and not-too-hard: it should only take a few days to complete, in between normal school work. This is only the first year for GHOP, so there are only 10 projects involved this year, and I really hope that it will be a success and that it will grow like GSoC in the following years so that more organizations can welcome those young contributors.

On the GNOME side, we'll be using the gnome-love mailing list as a central hub for this. It's the best place to help people contribute, and therefore to help the students complete the tasks. Everything has been prepared in the last few weeks in a small corner, and a team of around 10-15 GNOME people have been slowly working on our participation to this contest. We would have loved to see the whole community involved, but we couldn't let the word out; that's why we asked several people working on various topics within GNOME to join the small team. With this team, we've defined a first list of tasks, but the good thing is that the community can now propose new tasks. I'm eager to see other people jumping in and have new task suggestions that we can approve.

Oh, and soon, we should have a specific GNOME/GHOP logo and/or flyer to help promote the contest :-)