Last week I was lucky enough to spend some time at the Googleplex with Tomasz  Dobrzyński bug squad member and Joomla! grand prize winner in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, his mother, and the students, parents and mentors from the nine other open source projects that participated in GHOP.

Thursday we had a fun day starting with Ghop at Ihop for breakfast (for non Americans IHOP is a chain of pancake restaurants). Then on Friday, we had the award ceremony and an amazing day of talks about things like Google infrastructure, Android, the Google App Engine and, my personal bug squad favorite, testing.

You can read more about it in Leslie's post at the Google Open Source Program blog

You can see the award ceremony here:

And Tomasz and I hit Youtube here:

IF Google were to run another GHOP Contest this year, we would be smart to be thinking about possible tasks already. If you wanted to see the kinds of tasks we offered last year you could find them here. And, hypothetically, you could even leave ideas in the comments.

And if you are a high school student who would theoretically be interested in participating, you could read some of the tasks and look at the wiki and learn how to set up a development environment, see how to work in the documentation cookie jar, or learn something about translation. Just because some of the students mentioned that doing that kind of thing made the first tasks they did challenging.