SilverStripe

Google Highly Open Participation Awards Ceremony held at the Googleplex

Posted by Sigurd on 17 July 2008

Late last year, Google launched a global software contest for highschool students called the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. The contest boasted some impressive statistics: nearly 400 students around the world contributed a total of about 1000 tasks for ten software projects over a very busy two-month period.

SilverStripe was one of the ten projects in the contest, with tasks by students ranging from translating SilverStripe to other languages, building themes and widgets, testing, and doing presentations to spread the awareness of our software. Much of this work is in use by thousands of SilverStripe sites.

After the contest ended, we announced three individuals we felt had done outstanding work for SilverStripe, and announced Polish Wojtek Szkutnik as the grand prize winner.

Last week, Google held an awards ceremony for the the ten grand prize winners as chosen by the respective projects involved. The ceremony included a representative from each project and was held at  Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, and also featured a campus tour and interesting talks about Google,  Android, Google App engine, and internal testing methodologies.

Contest overview and awards ceremony footage

Google put together a 14 minute video summarising the contest.

Interview with SilverStripe's winner at Google

SilverStripe's grand prize winner, Wojtek, and SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson briefly discuss the GHOP contest (under two minutes.)

Five minute interview with Wojtek by SilverStripe

We took a few minutes to interview Wojtek too. You can also read an written interview with Wojtek from earlier in the year.

Thanks very much to Leslie Hawthorn and her team who made the contest shine! The contest really showed the virtues of open source, the talents of highschoolers, and was a very enjoyable experience for SilverStripe.

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