I don't know how many of you read the front page of drupal.org so I'll try and summarize the contents of http://drupal.org/node/195913. * Google has announced a contest for 13-18 year olds to help them get involved in open source. * How the contest works is the various open source projects (one of which was Drupal) write up a series of tasks, each of which would take between 2-5 days to complete. * Tasks can be anything from coding to documentation to research to... * Students "claim" a task and win prizes for completing one or more tasks (a t-shirt, $100-$500, up to a grand prize of a trip to Google HQ) * Each project can have a total of 102 tasks. (That number may go up though, depending on how successful the program is.) At the program launch, Drupal had about 45 tasks. *Over half* of these were claimed *on the first day of the contest.* While this is fantastic, both for the prospect of the contest and for the Drupal project, it does come with one rather large problem: We DESPERATELY need your help so we can keep up with these students!! :) We basically need an army of people to head over to http://groups.drupal.org/node/7362 and start creating potential tasks that we could use in this program using the guidelines/template from http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/wiki/HowToW.... Please note that writing a task means more than "Well what about something with such and such module?" and means actually thinking it through and putting it into words what exactly you're looking for, and scoping it so it can be done by a student in a short time frame. That said, it's a great opportunity to get some of these "really important but too many other fires" problems taken care of, or scratching personal itches (as long as you can justify its importance to the project as a whole), or something that would greatly improve drupal.org, or what have you. Tasks that have been popular thusfar: - Theming related stuff (make bluemarine color module-enabled, create a D6 theme..) - Create a recipe for $foo (podcasting, school news site, single-user blog, personal site...) - Create a video for $foo (translating Drupal, TortoiseCVS...) - Fix $foo documentation (upgrading docs, snippets, D6 help docs..) - Coding tasks (port $foo module to 6.x, create install profile...) - Translate $foo into $bar language (patch videos.. anything else that makes sense to translate??) - Marketing tasks (interview Dries, create promotional graphics/brochures...) Then again, it's only been a day, so kind of hard to predict trends. ;) I *really* appreciate anyone's help on this. And if you're IRC-capable, please idle in #drupal-ghop and help answer students' questions. -Angie