Google announced their Highly Open Participation Contest today. I really hope that the name is not a backronym inspired by the common acronym for International House of Pancakes. GHOP is an effort to bring pre-university students into the open source fold through a Summer of Code-like program. Whereas GSoC projects were required to center around code, these GHOP efforts can be related to documentation, QA, R&D, translation, and assorted other areas, as specified by participating project’s issue trackers.
10 open source projects were selected for this initial run. FFmpeg was not one of them. According to the FAQ page, “each project has a fairly low barrier to entry”. I admit, that would eliminate FFmpeg from consideration right away.
You have to remember that high school kids likely dont have the time (because school, homework, chores etc) or skills to pull off the sort of projects GSOC is doing. So the GHOP tasks have been chosen as tasks that can be done without investing huge amounts of time on it or needing to learn a lot about the projects involved. “Write decoder for xyz codec” is NOT something most high-school kids would be able to do.
I categorically reject the assertion that high school students have less free time on their hands than college students, but maybe that’s just personal experience. :-)
The knowledge thing could be a valid point, since college undergraduates will generally have 1 or 2 programming classes under their belt as a basis. However, that’s not a requirement either– a GSoC applicant only needs to be enrolled in college in the first place; major doesn’t matter. GSoC students could be entirely self-taught in programming, same as HS students.
It’s neither here nor there, however. It’s Google’s program, they set the rules, and I am interested to see how this new initiative pans out.
Well maybe we could have somebody helping a bit in populating the wiki and/or spend time cleaning the doxy comments ^^;
(requirements: patience, English knowledge, svn usage)
ok ok, that’s quite a side activity but anyway useful…