[development] Desperate plea for help on the GHOP program

[Angela Byron]

Angela Byron wrote:
> GHOP: Google Contest. Week-long tasks (coding, documentation, or 
> otherwise) that 13-18 year olds knock out of the park. See 
> http://drupal.org/node/195913 for contest details.
> 
> Good news: These students are frickin' awesome. Check out our list of 
> completed tasks so far: 
> http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/issues/list?can=1&q=status%3AClosed 
> 
> 
> Bad news: We need *help* to maintain this momentum.

Ok, well. First, my sincere thanks to the handful of amazing people who 
heeded my cry for help and created some *excellent* task ideas at 
http://drupal.org/project/issues/ghop, as well as the team who's been 
helping with the ongoing GHOP administration/mentoring/reviewing/etc. 
With your efforts, we were able to add 5 new tasks in the past 48 hours 
(4 of which have since been claimed), with probably another 5 to come as 
soon as minor revisions are made.

To the rest of you, I don't really know what else to do.

I've tried asking for help on the mailing lists.
I've tried asking for help on Drupal Planet.
I've tried asking for help in IRC.
I've tried RE-asking for help on the devel list.
I've now tried asking for help on the front page of Drupal.org, as well.

We have /tons/ of students who are literally chomping at the bit to work 
with the Drupal community, and snapping up tasks as quickly as we can 
make them. And we have /tons/ of stuff around here that needs doing and 
would make a great learning experience for a student. But yet only a 
tiny fraction of our community is stepping up to help join those two 
needs together. It's quite frustating, I have to say. :(

We're now down to a whopping *8 available tasks* for students to choose 
from:

http://opentouch.info/tmp/ghop/ghop-stats.html

Plone has 70, MoinMoin has 50, and Joomla! and Plone have 35. I know 
where I would be focusing my energies if I were a student in this 
contest, and it wouldn't be with Drupal. This is a real shame. The 
results from the first two weeks of this program were absolutely 
phenomenal: http://drupal.org/node/200510

-Angie