The winners of the first GHOP contest visited us for the awards ceremony at the Googleplex on July 11, 2008. These 10 burgeoning computer scientists travelled from across the globe, visiting from as far afield as Poland, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the East Coast of the United States. You can read more about each participating open source project's Grand Prize Winner below.
Apache Software Foundation
Spencer Davis completed seven tasks for the Apache Software Foundation, with high marks in all four categories: Creativity, Thoroughness, Quality of Work and especially in Open Source Community Involvement, which in our opinion is a very important goal of GHOP. Congratulations to Spencer; we found his presentation on the ASF excellent and his performance in all other tasks was wonderful. Congratulations to Spencer!
Drupal
Peter Cawley used coding prowess to make massive improvements to a variety of widely-used contributed modules, including Workflow-NG, Code Filter, and User Points. His efforts to create SimpleTest coverage for the Content Construction Kit module are also critically important for implementing this functionality into the next version of Drupal. Peter's greatest achievement was the brand new Flexifilter module, which is a single module that allows for configuring almost any type of filter from an administrative interface, rather than needing to download several different modules. Peter has gone on to further enhance and improve the module after the conclusion of the contest, along with several fellow GHOP student. Congratulations to Peter!
GNOME
The GNOME Project has selected Patrick Hulin as our Grand Prize Winner because of the quality and quantity of his contributions to the project. He worked on a varied set of tasks including documentation enhancements, perfomance contributions to GTK+, test coverage improvements in glib and cairo, and bug fixing on several GNOME modules. Congratulations to Patrick!
Joomla!
Tomasz Dobrzyński was unanimously selected as Joomla!'s 2008 Grand Prize Winner of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest . Tomasz completed seven tasks during the competition. His first task was translating the Joomla! v 1.5 Installation Manual into Polish. He completed three unit testing tasks for the new release. As a result of his efforts, three new extensions are now available, including an automatic calendar icon that shows the date an article was created; a plugin that updates Twitter with the title and URL for a published article; and, an Avatar/Gravatar extension for articles and comments.
Selecting a winner was difficult because there are many deserving contestants. In review, it was obvious that GHOP was more than a contest for Tomasz. He demonstrated what contributing to a free software community should be like. He discovered that learning is fun, he expressed joy in sharing what he produced with others, he was proud to contribute his gifts, and honored to be a part of the Joomla! community. As is true with many other contestants, Tomasz inspired those of us who worked with the program and reminded us why we also contribute. Congratulations to Tomasz!
MoinMoin
The MoinMoin project selected Federico Lorenzi unanimously as the Grand Prize Winner because of the outstanding work he did on the code base, training material and pages on the main wiki site. Not only did he deliver results that convinced us because of his well crafted solutions to hard or extensive problems but he also managed to keep up communication with other project members very well. Congratulations to Federico!
Mono
Mono selected Daniel Abramov as their Grand Prize Winner for several reasons. He jumped straight into a large codebase yet promptly produced very competent code, making appropriate use of our largely undocumented APIs. He also completed two tasks for MonoDevelop (MD) and several for Gendarme. We're particularly excited that he came onto IRC to regularly discuss things and seems interested in doing further development. In fact, he's already updated the MD Russian translation independently of his work for GHOP. Congratulations to Daniel!
Moodle
Moodle chose Worrapat Boonyarittipong due to his outstanding work on some of our most challenging tasks - Selenium scripts, creating a developer guide for upgrading to XMLDB, and developing a patch to improve performance. Although it must have taken Worrapat a great deal of time to understand the complex code, he completed each task on time and to the highest standard. He also made a valuable contribution to the Thai Moodle community in improving the Thai language pack and by creating a Moodle presentation in Thai. Congratulations to Worrapat!
Plone
Plone selected Jonathan Wilde because he completed complex theming and UI tasks to an outstanding level of quality. Not only did he perform extensive cross browser tests for his themes but he clearly considered usability and possible real-world bugs before submitting his work. When extensions were suggested he replied with a new version or engaged in a design discussion first. He also blogged about problems he overcame when he found a lack of documentation. Congratulations to Jonathan!
Python Software Foundation
The Python Software Foundation chose Jaroslaw Tworek for his excellent in-depth work on PySoy and SymPy. In a matter of weeks, he completed the equivalent of an entire (rather difficult) Summer of Code project for PySoy, and he has continued to contribute to the PySoy community. His work on SymPy was of similarly high quality and he showed the same enthusiasm. Jaroslaw stood out even among our other finalists for the Python project.
All in all, Jaroslaw completed eleven tasks for the Python component of the Google Highly Open Participation project: four SymPy tasks, five PySoy tasks, one ShedSkin task, and one miscellaneous task. Congratulations to Jaroslaw!
SilverStripe
SilverStripe chose Wojciech Szkutnik as their Grand Prize Winner. Wojciech distinguished himself by doing 29 tasks, the greatest output from among all of our student participants. Even if another student had done the same quantity, Wojciech would still have gained a lead due to the diversity of work he did. He delivered at least one of almost every type of task we laid out and he had to learn much more than some other participants about our project, community, and process. Congratulations to Wojciech!