Google Highly Open Participation Contest: Horrible Name, Good Idea
Google has announced the "Google Highly Open Participation Contest," a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development. — The contest, announced …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Highly Open Participation Contest arrives at the end of a dense week of Google self-promotion: on November 27, 2007 alone, the company launched My Maps-era consumer features, unveiled a renewable-energy R&D group with a cheaper-than-coal goal, and was reported to be planning a consumer file-storage service aimed straight at Microsoft. Against that backdrop, this contest is Google applying the same playbook — scale plus brand — to a new audience: secondary school and high school students.
TechCrunch's own framing captures the reception: the name is 'horrible,' the idea good. Google amplified the launch through its own Google Code Blog, signaling that the program is run out of its open-source operation rather than its education marketing arm.
First-order effects
- Pre-university students gain a structured, low-stakes entry point into open source codebases, and participating projects receive a wave of small, mentored task completions they would not otherwise staff.
Second-order effects
- Other companies and open source foundations running contributor-outreach efforts face pressure to formalize youth programs, since Google just raised the baseline for what corporate open-source stewardship looks like.
Third-order effects
- If the model holds, the path into software careers shifts further toward demonstrable public contribution histories over credentials, with large vendors acting as gatekeepers who define which contributions count — a contestable form of gatekeeping that competitors and foundations may need to answer.
The trend: Large technology companies are institutionalizing open source as an early-career talent funnel, using branded contests to recruit contributors years before they enter the job market.