Earlier this year, we concluded the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP), our pilot initiative to get pre-university students involved in Open Source development. Given how difficult it was for the participating organizations to choose a single Grand Prize Winner, we're happy to share more stories about other outstanding GHOP contributors.
Amy Stephen, one of the Joomla! project's GHOP organizers, wrote in with this post detailing the accomlishments of their runner ups:
The Joomla! community was richly rewarded by the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. 75 students completed 118 tasks, resulting in 31 extensions, 29 documents, 17 brochures and non-profit Web sites, 16 unit tests, 13 installation guide translations, 9 training videos and 3 usability tests, all available for the Joomla! community.
It was difficult choosing a winner from our ten outstanding finalists, but surprisingly more difficult narrowing our finalists to a list of runner ups. Ultimately, our selection was based on continued contributions following the GHOP contest. We're proud to acknowledge our GHOP runner ups here and sincerely thank each for their dedication to Joomla!.
Chad Windnagle
Chad Windnagle (drmmr768) is a long time community member and extremely knowledgeable with Joomla!. Now, he is a contributor on the Joomla! Documentation Team. He is friendly, conscientious and assisted many GHOP contestants during the contest. Chad completed these tasks: how to use contact functions for a services directory; how to use Joomla!'s "Register to Read More" functionality; how to add in the TinyMCE Spell Checker capability; how to modify the default template; and how to troubleshoot template installations.
Justo de Rivera
Justo de Rivera (justo.derivera) is a contributor with the Joomla! Bug Squad and will also participate in the Joomla! Day Spain. He is a promising developer who completed two complex extensions, both of which are popular with the community. For GHOP, Justo developed a Blog Sidebar Calendar and the xml-rpc MetaWeblog API that enables community members to blog using external blogging editors like Flock and Flickr.
Marieke van der Tuin
Marieke van der Tuin (Marieke92) has been active in the Dutch Joomla! community, is now a key contributor on the Joomla! Documentation Team, leader and organizer, and helpful in countless ways. For GHOP, Marieke translated the Dutch Installation Guide and a Team Blog; created four unit testing documents including tests for the Article Manager, Template Manager, Frontpage Manager, and Media Manager; created a Guide to Extension parameter types; and, developed a Joomla! v 1.5 Module for Digg List Stories.
Max Shinn
Max Shinn (trombonechamp) is extremely creative and a natural community builder. It is very likely Max helped on every single writing task assigned for GHOP. His friendly and helpful approaches strengthened the community and made it fun to participate. Currently, Max is a contributor on the Joomla! Documentation Team and completed these GHOP tasks: created and performed a song in celebration of Joomla!; designed the What is Joomla!? tri-fold; wrote the Guide for the Joomla! Publisher; and, developed art that captures the spirit of "All Together, As a Whole."
Michael Casha
Michael Casha (MiCCAS) is another long time community member extremely knowledgeable with Joomla!. He is a very encouraging, positive and fun person to be around. He is a contributor with the Joomla! Bug Squad and one who participates in the project in whatever way he can. Michael had great success in GHOP by: creating a Google Gadgets module; recording a video accompaniment to the GHOP Joomla! Quickstart Guide; and, building a Joomla! v 1.5 website for a not for profit organization.
Shantanu Bala
Shantanu Bala (shantanubala) is another contributor with the Joomla! Bug Squad with a speciality in CSS (an area most developers prefer not to approach.) For GHOP, Shantanu created an innovative template for children including a simplified language file, editor, administrative environment, navigation system, all of which he continues to improve.
We'd like to thank Google for involving the Joomla! community and connecting us with 75 amazing students in what we hope is only the first year of this amazing contest. Congratulations to each of Joomla!'s winners and special thanks to each of you who participated. We hope yours was a positive experience and we look forward to hearing from each of you, again, in the future.
Congratulations to Chad, Justo, Marieke, Max and Michael! Many thanks to Amy for the post, and to the Joomla! community for mentoring students for GHOP.
We've seen many of you GHOPers on the program mailing list. Have you been working with your projects now that the contest is over? Comment and let us how you've been contributing.
