Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Welcome to Drupal's GHOP group!

add1sun — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 04:45:42 +0000

Join up and feel free to use this group to discuss the Drupal GHOP Contest. Please introduce yourself to the group by leaving a comment on the Introducing Yourself post and tell us a little about yourself, how you came to the contest and what you are (or would like to) work on.

Talk about the contest can range from questions you may have about how to accomplish certain tasks to observations you have about working with the Drupal community in the course of the contest. This isn't only for participating students but also for students who are just checking this whole thing out and for community members who wish to help by answering questions or brainstorming new task ideas.

If you're interesting in helping to manage the program, please subscribe to the issue updates and check out the notes for admins page.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Introducing Yourself

justMatt — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:20:40 +0000

I will kick off the introductions with a rather short post breaking the ice and introducing myself. My name is Matt Westlake, and I am an 18 yo student from Adelaide, Australia. I am currently nearing the end of my High School examinations. I have been lurking around the Drupal Project for around 2 years, but tend to play around in the theming arena. I plan to use GHOP to do more work in module building.
My Goals and projects of choice for GHOP are as follows

•Make the "bluemarine" theme in Drupal core recolorable
•Port API module to Drupal 6

I will aim to flesh out these projects over the coming days.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Important Prize Information

aclight@drupal.org — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:18:49 +0000

Hi Everyone

Students: Please read this message, even if you have already submitted your prize claim form. You may still need to do one more thing to get your prizes.

If you have not already claimed your prize, you are in luck. Google has extended the deadline by one week. You now must submit your prize claim form by Friday, 29 February at 8:00 UTC. You can find all instructions for submitting your prize claim
form here:
http://tinyurl.com/3bwl4k
Google has a bug in their prize claim form, in that you were not asked to enter your phone number. FedEx, the company that will be used to send you your prizes, requires a phone number. So you need to log back into your prize claim form and edit it to add your phone number.

Please see the ghop-announce post with full information on both of these items at:
http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_frm/thread/1e42b95ec...

Thanks everyone
Adam

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Welcome to DROP!

birdmanx35@drupal.org — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:34:25 +0000

I'd just like to give a warm welcome to everyone involved with DROP- students, mentors, and admins alike! For those of you that don't know, DROP is a successor to the just-closed GHOP program- we want all that learning and contributing to continue all year. So, head on over to the DROP site, sign up for a task, or create one yourself. Let us know how we can help you!

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

A Message to the Admins

DanW@drupal.org — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:31:23 +0000

Now that the contest is over, and all the winners have been announced*, I wanted to take a moment to thank the administrators, mentors, task-suggestors, and everyone else who kept this running smoothly over the past few months.

As one of the students, I can't say how great it felt to know that, not only was I helping a project which I am using on a regular basis, but that there were people out there who genuinely wanted to help me get stuff done on Drupal, and were willing to work with me as I made a complete fool out of myself. :)

Thanks a lot guys, you rock!

Dan

_{and I can't be accused of trying to rig the Grand Prize decision :P (although seriously, congrats to corsix - you did a great job!)}

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Make sure to claim your GHOP prizes

aclight@drupal.org — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:05:16 +0000

Hey everyone

If you haven't done so already, please go to http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_thread/thread/5c541b... for information on how to claim your prizes. You'll need to fill out a form with your mailing address and the list of tasks you completed and send that to Google. You should have already sent in your parental consent form. If not, information on how to do that is at http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_thread/thread/e5dd79....

Let us know if you have any questions.

You all did a great job (students and mentors) and we're very glad to have had your help.

Thanks
Adam

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Help the Project* module! Help get aclight to DrupalCon Boston!

Alex UA — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:54:31 +0000

Some of you may have seen Kieran Lal's pitch to the Drupal community to help get Derek Wright (dww) and Chad Phillips (hunmonk) to DrupalCon Boston to work on the crucial Project* modules, and many of you chipped in to help Derek and Chad reach their goals. But the project* team can still use your help!

Adam Light (aclight on Drupal.org) is also trying to get to DrupalCon to work on Project*, and trust me, it will be worth ten times whatever you can give. I have only had limited interactions with Adam, who I don't know personally, but even those limited interactions have blown my socks off. Adam was a tireless volunteer for the GHOP program, and his work with these students was truly out of this world (take a look at any of the GHOP issues that Adam helped out with and you'll see what I'm referring to). As Webchick noted on her blog post asking for help for Adam and Jimmy "boombatower" Berry: "Adam was the one primarily carrying the torch during the latter half of the GHOP program, and was critical to ensuring its success."

I happened upon a blog post Adam wrote in which he requested assistance on the DrupalCon Boston feed, and I think that Adam is a bit too modest to post his request here, so that's why I'm writing this. Here's how Adam describes his contributions to Drupal:

Getting free tagging for issues (or at least tagging) up and running on Drupal.org. Depending on the final implementation, this new module will allow users with the appropriate permissions to change the taxonomy terms assigned to a node from within a comment on that node (example). Ever wanted to tag an issue with "newbie", "pgSQL", or "javascript" terms? This module will make it happen.

Comparing other issue trackers to get an idea of what we're doing right and where we have room for improvement. For example, I recently posted a thorough comparison of the Project issue tracking module with the Google code issue tracker.

I was one of the administrators of the Google Highly Open Participaton (GHOP) project. We've gotten students to complete about 120 tasks of various natures.

I was the mentor for two Project* related GHOP tasks. One task added automated creation of project issue nodes and comments, and one that adds a filter that turns issue node references in posts into links to the issue itself.

If you can, please help the project* modules, and help get Adam Light to DrupalCon Boston! If you'd like to know more about Adam, take a look at Webchick's Contributor Spotlight that featured Adam.

Issue tracking and software releases

Personal Thoughts On Learning Usability And Usability Resources

Bevan@drupal.org — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:16:04 +0000

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in drupal contrib and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit too:

===============================
Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

Others want to be musical but aren't naturally musical. They take lessons and learn their tools (their musical instruments). These people can also be good at music, but they had a harder time getting there.

You will probably recognize in yourself if have natural usability sense. If you look at an interface that doesn't work and can straight away pick out not only what's wrong with it, but also tell how to fix it, then you are off on a great start! You 'get' usability naturally.

If you can tell that one UI is better than another but aren't sure why, or if you can't easily identify what the problems are in a bad UI, then 'getting usability' might be harder for you. In my humble opinion, code-heavy programmers tend to be more like this.

When programmers use a UI, they strive to build a mental map of the objects, data and software they are manipulating. This is what makes them good at writing complex algorithms and doing crazy things like building APIs to abstract complex but frequent processes, compressing JS & CSS and other data, writing efficient optimized SQL that gets the right data for the task, rewriting an existing API from the ground up to work more efficiently.

Because of this, most programmers see right through a UI and don't notice if it's good or bad. As long as they can maintain their mental map in order, then the UI is transparent and doesn't matter much. IMHO proponents of CLIs stereotypify these folk.

If this is you, but you still want to be good at usability, take time to share ideas suggestions and thoughts with others, use resources and follow usability working groups. There is some great literature on usability too. Or, if usability is really a drag, try finding some one else to take over the UI of your projects, and focus on the backend. Even if you 'get' usability naturally, these learning suggestions are still important to gain motivation, ideas and keep up with the game.

As for specific resources, I subscribe to feeds from UXmatters and A List Apart. They sometimes have great usability-oriented articles that are also often highly relevant to web UIs. Note that UXmatters is often specific to corporate professional UX designers and isn't very relevant. The Usability group on g.d.o is another wealth of information. If you have time I'd recommend filtering through archived threads and articles for articles that interest you.

Here are some UXmatters articles I particularly enjoyed:

The Perpetual Super-Novice
Information Architecture
Emotions and Persona
Intro to Eyetracking
Mockups
Form labels
More form research
Data tables -- Drupal needs work in this area
User-centered design
A book review
Navigation and Icons
Color-blindness
Home pages
Scalable Design

And discussions on g.d.o:

And ALA articles:

As for books, I don't have any and can't recommend any. Try searching for usability and UI book reviews for one that you think is relevant to you.

Oh, I do have one called "Getting Real" by 37signals of BaseCamp fame. It's more about agile and user-centered design and development but has a lot of interesting ideas on how to approach usability from a larger POV, and also has some excellent UI hints and tips.

Usability

Front-page drupal.org GHOP final status report

cwgordon7@drupal.org — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 09:58:34 +0000

Below is a draft of the front-page final status report on GHOP. Feedback is appreciated. :)
---------

Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link, or listen to the latest Lullabot podcast about GHOP.

Since our last status report on January 2, 2008:

An additional 12 students have taken on tasks from the Drupal project, bringing our total to 54 student participants.
11 new students have completed one or more tasks, bringing our total to 49, which means that Drupal has just gained that many AWESOME contributors! Of that number, approximately 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest.
There have been a total of 136 tasks completed so far, which is more than double the last report, which marked us at 67 completed tasks. This means that 69 new tasks to benefit the community have been done in just the last month. The leaders in terms of raw task numbers are boombatower (12) and Corsix (15), with cwgordon7 (9), kourge (9) and ezyang (10) coming up behind. As their high drupal.org user ids indicate, all of these top students except kourge and cwgordon7 were brought to Drupal from the GHOP program— and they are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community.
Thanks to everyone for all of the community support we've received on this project! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

This is it, GHOP is over! However, judging from it's success, we feel confident that this program will be repeated again next year. There will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months.

Read on for a description of the tasks that have been completed since the last status update.

Drupal's GHOP Students Rule!

Here's a list of our newly completed tasks in the past 3 weeks.

Coding

Corsix braved one of the most challenging tasks available, and thrived in his creation of the new flexifilter module, a powerful tool that allows site builders to create highly customizable filters and coders with a simple, clean API to work with.
boombatower also wrote the new Click HeatMap module, which provides integration between Drupal and the ClickHeat library.
cwgordon7 wrote a patch for the core taxonomy module to make synonyms more useful in freetagging vocabularies, both by suggesting the base term in the drop-down autoselect field when a synonym is entered, as well as reverting synonyms to their base terms upon submission.
Corsix also wrote a workflow-ng logging module, and then went on to add views support for that module.
kourge fixed the Drupal autocomplete throbber so that it works in Safari 2.
ezyang modified the API module (which powers http://api.drupal.org/) to show documentation of global variables.

Quality Assurance

Corsix also wrote simpletestsfor the cck module, in order to ensure that this very important module maintained it's high quality.
Speaking of simpletests, boombatower wrote simpletests for the comment module and the filter module. Simpletests for core are crucial to write because Drupal core needs to be extremely stable before release, and simpletests will help to ensure that stability.

Documentation

birdmanx35 wrote documentation for the new flexifilter module, and posted it to the Drupal handbooks.
kourge updated and improved the audio module's flash player theming documentation.
boombatower created a presentation on the simpletest module, emphasizing its use in quality assurance.
TimRogersCool created a presentation on the power of open source software and how, in particular, it could help his school.

User Interface

cwgordon7 updated the project module's user interface to be more intuitive. Drupal.org itself depends on the project module.

Videos

boombatower created a 30-second Drupal commercial.

What comes next?

GHOP is now over, and a huge success, thanks to your support. We hope to continue this next year— but for now, we have created a new, Drupal-specific project that will continue this success: DROP (Drupal Rockin' Open Participation). DROP will strive to capture the small, bite-sized task aspect of GHOP: but there will be no age restrictions of any sort, as well as only recognition as a prize. Want to see your name up here in a month or two? Then become a DROP participant, and begin doing tasks! See this article for more information on this exciting new project!

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Issue Tracker Comparison: Project issue tracking module vs. Google code tracker

aclight@drupal.org — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:07:39 +0000

For the past two months, I have been acting as one of the administrators of the Drupal side of the Google Highly Open Participation program (GHOP for short). Briefly, this is a contest that is sponsored by Google in which secondary students (ages 13-18) can claim and complete short one week tasks created by the Drupal community for cash prizes. One of the requirements of the program is that everyone has to use the Google Code task/issue tracker for tracking the "official" progress of the students throughout their tasks. As I have been pretty involved with development of our own issue tracker (the Project issue tracking module used on drupal.org), I thought it would be useful to provide a comparison of the features of these two different systems and make some suggestions of how we can improve the Project issue tracking module to make it even better than it already is.

I'll start by giving an introduction to the main issue tracking features of both the Project issue tracking module and the Google code tracker. I'll also give a description of the administrative user interface from an individual project owner/maintainer's perspective. Next, I'll provide a feature comparison and point out the pros and cons of both systems. Finally, I'll provide some recommendations on specific areas where we can add or improve the Project issue tracking module to make it better than it already is. I want to point out that I am not mentioning any of the features of either tracker that allow it to interface with code, releases, or repositories since we did not use any such features for the GHOP program and thus I would not be able to make a fair comparison.

Project issue tracking module

Basic issue tracking

To create an issue on drupal.org, a user clicks the Create menu link and is taken to a form with several fields to fill out, including the Title and Body of the issue, as well as several issue metadata fields such as Project, Version, Component, Category, Priority, Assigned, and Status. At the top of the form is an area where the project's maintainer(s) can add some instructional text to remind users to search before submitting or anything else (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Creating an issue

All issues have a table displaying the current metadata values for the issue at the top (Figure 2). Notice also that issues can have links, code highlighting, and other features which are all provided by various input filters. At the bottom of each issue is the comment form where a user can update the issue or provide feedback on the issue as necessary (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Issue display

Figure 3: Issue comment form

The Project issue tracking module provides an overview table that displays some of the important information about many issues at once (Figure 4). The displayed issues can be filtered by the project the issue is associated with, the status of the issue, the category within the project that the issue relates to (eg. Code, Documentation, User interface), and the priority (eg. Minor, Normal, Critical). Issues of different statuses are color coded for quick identification. Issues can also be sorted by the displayed criteria by clicking the table header links.

Figure 4: Issue table

A link from the issues overview table takes the user to an Advanced search page, on which the user can search for issues that meet many different criteria (Figure 5). A link to the issue subscription interface is also on the overview table. Users can choose to subscribe to None, Own issues, or All issues for any particular project (Figure 6). A subscription to an issue means that the user will be notified via email whenever a new comment has been posted to a given issue, or when a new issue has been created for a given project. Own issues are issues which a given user created or has commented on. Therefore, if one wants to subscribe to an issue, he has to post a comment to the issue, even if the comment is as simple as "Subscribing".

Figure 5: Advanced search

Figure 6: Subscription options

Administration

Project maintainers have permission to edit their project(s), and from the edit page there is an Issues tab. The maintainer can add additional categories that will be available for users to select from and can also add text that will be displayed in a box above the submission form for all new issues (Figure 7). Finally, the project maintainer can choose to have e-mail messages sent to an address and/or have a list of all critical issues for the project sent weekly to an address.

Figure 7: Project maintainer issues settings

Project administrators (who are often also administrators of the entire site and not just one or more projects) also have the ability to create additional statuses (Figure 8). Administrators also have the ability to specify the default status (all new issues have this status, unless the submitter changes it to something else), and to specify which statuses should be included in the query that results in the default issues table discussed above.

Figure 8: Project administrator statuses

Google code issue tracker

Basic issue tracking

The Google code new issue form is a bit simpler than that created by the Project issues module (Figure 9), because Google stores most metadata by using Labels instead of having separate fields (I'll go into this in more depth a bit later). There is a Summary field (analogous to the "Title" field in Project issue tracking) and a Description field (same as the Body field). Once nice thing is that by default the description text area is prepopulated with a template that in many cases might lead to the user providing a more useful bug report, etc. The text of this template can be set by an administrator (see below). The owner and status metadata fields are separate fields, and then a user can add one or more labels to describe the issue. One nice feature is the yellow star, which (somewhat confusingly) means that a user is subscribed to that issue and will receive e-mail updates whenever a new comment is added to that issue. Any user can click or unclick the yellow star to toggle their subscription status to that issue.

Figure 9: Google tracker: Create issue

When viewing an issue that has already been created, the Google code tracker has a similar look to the Project issue tracking module with a few exceptions (Figure 10). The issue metadata is on the left and a bit more separated from the similar Project issue table, but a similar result could be accomplished via Drupal theming. More notable is the complete lack of HTML or links in the issue description. Issues all have Prev and Next links at the top which allow a user to first create a list of issues via some query and then go through them one by one. Another big difference is that, unlike with Project issues, it is not possible to edit an issue or comment using the Google code tracker. Some might argue that this is desired so that once something about an issue is created it can never change. However, the downside is that minor typos, etc. cannot be corrected easily. Just like with the Project issue tracking module, the Google code tracker highlights any changes to issue metadata made in comments.

Figure 10: Google tracker: Issue

As with the Project issue tracking module, the Google code tracker provides an overview table with listings of multiple issues at once (Figure 11). Searching for issues is very easy and fast (not surprising considering we're talking about Google). A drop down menu next to the search box allows one to search for open issue, all issues, etc. The search box allows for searching by metadata as well (eg. a search for "status:open filter" would return all open issues with the word "filter" in the body or title). An advanced search link provides an interface to restrict the search to certain words and works in a similar way to the advanced search provided by the Project issue tracking module.

Figure 11: Google tracker: Issues table

As I mentioned before, once nice feature of the Google code tracker is that any CamelCase label with a hyphen is interpreted as a category for the purposes of display in the issue listing table. The ClaimedBy, DueDate, and DrupalIssue columns are all generated by adding labels such as "ClaimedBy-kourge", "DueDate-2008-01-15", and "DrupalIssue-123456" to individual issues. An individual user can add one or more of these CamelCase fields to his table view by clicking on the "..." in the upper right corner of the table (Figure 12).

Figure 12: Google tracker: View additional columns

At the upper right corner of the table a user can select the Grid view, which displays issues with one attribute along the X axis and one along the Y axis (Figure 13). Individual issues can be displayed by issue number (see photo) or by # of issues or title of issue. Such a view makes it easy to see at a glance how many issues with each status each user has.

Figure 13: Google tracker: Grid view

Administration

For users with access to administer a project's settings, it's easy to set different status values and to define which values are considered to be "Open" and which are considered to be "Closed" (Figure 14). It's also possible to predefine labels and to give each a description so that users are more likely to select the appropriate label(s) when submitting issues or comments. It is possible to specify label prefixes that can be used at most one time on any individual issue (eg. "ClaimedBy"). Finally, as mentioned above an administrator can set the default template text for issues of different types, and can also set the columns and sort order of those columns that are used in the issues table view (Figure 15).

Figure 14: Google tracker admin: Labels

Figure 15: Google tracker admin: Columns

Direct Comparison

Project issue tracking module

Pros
1. Ability to edit issues and comments
2. Input filters can be used to allow HTML code and links
3. Good use of color in tables listing issues makes it easy to get a sense of the number of issues of various statuses (such as code needs work, review, fixed, etc.)
4. Open source, can be modified as desired, can be run on your own site
5. Issues and contributions across all projects by a specific user can be monitored in one place
Cons
1. Adding additional types of metadata requires coding and even then is not easy
2. Fixed issue listing table does not allow user to view additional fields
3. Impossible to subscribe to individual issues without posting a "Subscribe" comment
4. Impossible to unsubscribe to individual issues
5. Free tagging of issues is not possible
6. Some administration options (such as the possible statuses) are per-site, not per project

Google code tracker

Pros
1. Search capabilities are very good and robust
2. Additional metadata fields can be created using "CamelCasePrefix-value" labels
3. Tables can be customized by individual users as well as project administrators to display the most useful fields
4. Subscribing and unsubscribing to individual issues is quick and does not require creating a comment in the issue itself
5. All configuration options are per-project, not per site
6. Since it runs on Google's massive server farms, search and use is usually very fast
Cons
1. No editing of issues or comments makes it impossible to correct typos, etc.
2. Lack of links and code filters makes it difficult to display certain types of information, such as code, in a user friendly way
3. Closed source and cannot be used off of code.google.com
4. No RSS feeds of issues (as far as I can tell)
5. No cross-project tracking/monitoring of a user's individual issues/comments

Recommendations

From the list of pros and cons above, it's probably pretty clear that I feel that the Project issue tracking module has room for improvement. However, I do want to point out that I feel the pros of the Project issue tracking module are much more important than the pros of the Google code tracker. In my opinion, the lack of links and code styling in the Google code tracker is a significant usability hurdle. For GHOP this wasn't too big of a deal because there wasn't the need to post code in the tracker very often, but for regular development this would be a deal breaker, in my opinion.

Looking at the cons of the Project issue tracking module (and the pros of the Google code tracker), most of the items fall into three categories: viewing lists/tables of issues, subscribing/unsubscribing to issues, and categorizing/tagging issues.

Viewing lists/tables of issues

As specified in the Project* roadmap for D6, the planned conversion of the issue queues into being Views enabled (#76725)will be a big step forwards in terms of allowing for more customization of the listings. The code in the Project issue tracking module that currently handles these queries and display of the data is very much legacy code and it is extremely complicated. Offloading this onto the Views module should help to greatly simplify a key part of the module.

Subscribing to issues

The Subscriptions module has recently been rewritten and is currently in beta testing. Using the Subscriptions module (#34496) instead of the code currently built into the Project issue tracking module could be a great way to provide added subscription options while at the same time allowing us to rip a good chunk of code out of the Project issue tracking module. On a related note, the Views Bulk Operations module might provide a way to mimic the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe to an issue while viewing a list of multiple issues. [Edit: dmitrig01 has suggested that the Views Bookmarks module may be useful for this purpose as well.]

Categorizing/tagging issues

I am currently working on a patch to the Project issue tracking module (#187480) that will soon allow the use of free tagging vocabularies on drupal.org and on other sites using the Project issue tracking module.

Conclusions

While I think there are many ways in which the Project issue tracking can be improved, it is clearly a very useful tool at the moment and will only become more useful in the near future. I'd like to get feedback from others who are familiar with the Google code tracker to find out if I'm missing pros or cons of that system. Comments from GHOP students and other administrators would be especially helpful since these users have been intensely involved with both trackers recently.

Suggestions are always appreciated, but your contributions are even more valuable. You can start by reading the Project* roadmap for D6, because there's still a lot to get done there.

Issue tracking and software releases

Claiming Your GHOP Prizes

aclight@drupal.org — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:18:14 +0000

Students:

I'm passing along a message from Leslie Hawthorn, the director of GHOP at Google. She has asked us to make sure that all of our students get this and know to subscribe to the ghop-announce mailing list so you will know how to claim your prizes.

I am making this post a Wiki. So that we, the Drupal GHOP admins, can make sure that all of our students know about this, once you've subscribed to the ghop-announce mailing list please edit this Wiki and add your Google account name to the bottom of the list. Please list the account just like it does on code.google.com. In other words, it might be my.....@....ain.com or something like myusername. You only need to subscribe to the ghop-announce mailing list and add your name to the bottom of this wiki post if you have completed (or plan to complete) one or more tasks for the Drupal GHOP program. However, you may want to join the mailing list even if you have not completed a task.

Also, if you're not already a member of this GHOP group on groups.drupal.org, please subscribe to it (look for a link in the right sidebar) so that getting the news out to you for potential future competitions, etc. is easier.

Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone,

The timeline for claiming your GHOP prizes has been posted here:
http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_thread/thread/e5dd79...

If you are not yet subscribed to ghop-announce, please do so now. We
will send all information about collecting your prizes and
announcements of our grand prize winners to this list.

Mentors, if you could please pass this message along to your
contestants via your project mailing list, forums, etc. it would be
very helpful.

Cheers,
LH

Please add your Google code account name to the list below once you have subscribed to the ghop-announce mailing list:

myusername
myotherusername
yaseenhamster (ap0c0lyps3)
alexandrebfarias@gmail.com
cwgord...yahoo.com
c...gmx.de
corsix
birdmanx35
b.tastic
kourge
kyl191
themadha...@aol.com
yoniwiz
mwrochna
tranquilityreigns
dawehner
j.boombatower

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

"After GHOP: the plan" as posted in the other thread, except as a wiki page.

cwgordon7@drupal.org — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:59:50 +0000

Posted below is that plan as a wiki page. Everyone, feel free to edit it; just don't start a flame war ;) .

===

Ok, it sounds like people think this is generally a good idea. Here is a rough draft of how it's going to work. Nothing here is set in stone: I'll let everyone else argue over the specifics ;) .

Two projects on drupal.org: one for proposing short-term tasks, another for actually doing them. The advantages of this are:
- We get to use drupal.org's project trackers.
- The task proposal and task doing stay separate.
Proposed tasks get reviewed by the community, and once marked rtbc, moved over to the task-doing issue queue.
Tasks have several things they didn't have before:

A time limit:

It can be variable, as some tasks may take longer than others.
It's still good to have, because it keeps things moving.

An importance factor:

Some tasks are simply more important than others: making bluemarine recolorable, for instance, is of far more importance than porting module X to Drupal 6. (Maybe importance isn't the right word... impact? difficulty? educational?)
This way the students who claim more adventurous tasks aren't penalized.

Workflow:
1. Task is proposed.
2. Task proposal is reviewed, feedback given.
3. Task is revised.
4. Steps 2-3 are repeated until task is marked rtbc or won't fix.
5. Accepted task is posted to the task-doing queue.
6. Task is claimed by a student.
7. Student has up until the time limit to do the task.
8. If the task isn't finished by the time limit, attempt to contact student; allow three days in which to that. Extensions may be granted.
9. Task is completed and marked for review.
10. Task is reviewed, and feedback given.
11. Steps 9-10 are repeated until task is marked rtbc or otherwise approved as specified by the task ("deliverables").
12. Task is finished.
Notes on workflow:

Students may work on more than one task at a time.
If a task has been waiting more than three days for review, the task's owner gets negative karma points.
Students may claim tasks they've proposed.

The term "Students" does not just apply to 13-18 year olds: everyone is a student of life.
Drupal dojo: the dojo may become more and more involved in this as we go on. I think it's better to start them off as separate things and watch them naturally merge together rather than try to force cohesion where it might not belong.
Who's running this thing? Anyone who wants to. Anyone can review task ideas, as well as tasks themselves. In the case that no one contributes (which I'm sure you won't do), I'll step in to review task ideas, etc.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Click Heat Map Support

boombatower@drupal.org — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:00:59 +0000

I recently compiled a report, http://drupal.org/node/200054, on three click heat map frameworks and how they related to Drupal. In the report I suggested that ClickHeat he be integrated into Drupal.

The issue suggested that I explain how to setup a server to collect data using the click heat map. To do so few changes would have to be made to the base Drupal installation.

The ClickHeat library needs to be placed on the server in a place accessible to the web. The library can be downloaded form http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/.
A small snippet of JavaScript needs to be added to the page.tpl.php and configured to match the server settings. This can be done through the ClickHeat interface.

If this works out a module integration using less hack like methods can be created that also allows the results to be viewed from the Drupal administration panel, but for now this should work.

Usability

Usability in GHOP

Bevan@drupal.org — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:14:31 +0000

I have created a series of four usability testing tasks in the GHOP programme. Each one tests a different area of Drupal:

If you're a student, you only have a day to claim tasks.

If your on the usability group, you might be interesting in following these tasks and the results or even co-mentoring! :)

Regards,
Bevan/

Usability

After GHOP...

cwgordon7@drupal.org — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 06:15:17 +0000

Although it's very depressing and sadful, GHOP is drawing to a close. The question remains: what do we do now? We have many tasks that still need doing, yet we haven't had time to get to. We also have many, many, many awesome new contributors to Drupal, with nowhere to go. Let's avoid the two obvious paths of failure: for the tasks to be abandoned or the students to leave Drupal, never to come back again.

A proposed solution is to continue the GHOP program without Google's sponsorship. The details of this are somewhat hazy: Would it still be restricted to students? Would there still be prizes? Would the "winners" get some sort of recognition? Etc. So, post what you think would be the ideal solution, and then we can, if necessary, create an issue on drupal.org with the drupal.org webmasters to make whatever commitments are necessary (for example, promising a front-page post once a month with the "winners", etc.)

Looking forward to continuing this!

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Sessions on GHOP and the Community Wanted For Drupalcon 2008

mpare — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:11:23 +0000

My name is Matthew Pare and I'm a Co-Chair for the "Community and Core" track for Drupalcon Boston 2008. Over the last couple of weeks we have been planning and brainstorming to make Drupalcon Boston 2008 the best Drupalcon to date! One of our recommended track session topics is "GHOP in the Community" and since your viewing this post on the "GHOP" groups.drupal.org group I thought you would be excellent candidates for submitting sessions on the topic.

How To Submit Your Session

We have several recommended topics for Community and Core sessions but now its your turn to submit your session.

Visit boston2008.drupalcon.org to learn more about Drupalcon Boston 2008, register to attend, view already submitted sessions, and even submit your own session.

Save the Date

Drupalcon Boston 2008 takes place from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008 in Boston Convention and Expo Center. In addition, there will also be a Drupal Code Sprint on March 7.

Useful Links

Please submit your session proposals as soon as possible and I hope to see you all in Boston real soon.

Cheers,

-mpare

DON'T MISS EARTH'S LARGEST GATHERING OF DRUPAL PROFESSIONALS!
Drupalcon Boston 2008 - March 3-6, 2008
Learn more at http://boston2008.drupalcon.org

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

GHOP #127: Benchmark results table

Corni — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:57:05 +0000

Hi,
I need a table for #127, so it will go here :)
This table is now fully complete :)

Test Page	Caching	Drupal 5 requests/sec	Drupal 5 overalltime	Drupal 6 requests/sec	Drupal 6 overalltime	% differences for Drupal 6(based on requests/s)
Index with 30 nodes	No	3.64	55.13	3.42	58.46	-06%
	normal	136.62	1.46	109.09	1.83	-20%
	aggresive	161.51	1.23	114.48	1.74	-29%
Taxonomy Term (taxonomy/term/111&page=2)	No	5.16	38.73	4.71	42.44	-08%
	normal	not reliable accooding to ab	^^^	111.59	1.79	?
	aggresive	167.31	1.19	118.29	1.68	-29%
1 node with _lots_ of comments	No	3.56	56.25	3.38	59.20	-05%
	normal	149.64	1.33	116.35	1.71	-22%
	aggresive	177.58	1.12	results not reliable according to ab	^^^^	?
Forum Index	No	11.78	16.97	10.82	18.49	-08%
	normal	158.98	1.25	122.03	1.63	-23%
	aggresive	163.62	0.61	130.43	1.53	-20%
Search result	No	1.07	187.37	1.12	178.22	+04%
	normal	150.46	1.32	115.46	1.73	-23%
	aggresive	177.76	1.12	125.70	1.59	-29%

This is the old table, it is not relevant and only here for comparison!!!

Test Page	Caching	Drupal 5 requests/sec	Drupal 5 overalltime	Drupal 6 requests/sec	Drupal 6 overalltime	% differences for Drupal 6(based on requests/s)
Index with 30 nodes	No	3.74	26.71	3.40	29.39	-09%
	normal	101.68	0.98	81.53	1.22	-19%
	aggresive	114.13	0.87	84.79	1.17	-25%
Taxonomy Term (taxonomy/term/111&page=2)	No	5.34	18.72	4.72	21.19	-11%
	normal	109.44	0.91	84.82	1.17	-22%
	aggresive	101.50	0.98	88.99	1.12	-12%
1 node with _lots_ of comments	No	3.60	27.80	3.37	29.69	-06%
	normal	105.26	0.94	83.53	1.19	-20%
	aggresive	118.43	0.84	87.12	1.14	-26%
Forum Index	No	11.91	8.39	10.92	9.16	-08%
	normal	140.51	0.71	109.99	0.90	-21%
	aggresive	163.62	0.61	116.18	0.86	-28%
Search result	No	1.09	91.77	1.15	87.64	+05%
	normal	63.50	1.57	56.58	1.76	-10%
	aggresive	67.90	1.47	58.10	1.72	-14%

Link to GHOP Issue #127: http://drupal.org/node/206570

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

GHOP Session @ Drupalcon

webchick — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:44:38 +0000

As you've no doubt heard, Drupalcon Boston 2008 is on the way March 3 - 6, 2008. I've been contacted by the folks organizing the Community and Core track, and they're very interested in a session at Drupalcon about GHOP. :)

I figure we can have an agenda something like:

What the heck is GHOP?
What were the final outcomes of the contest? (statistics)
GHOP students in attendance get up and show off their cool work
Show off some other cool work done by students who couldn't attend
GHOP students and administrators talk a bit about their experiences, what worked/didn't work, and how to continue the "GHOP spirit" post-GHOP.
Q/A

So...

Are you a GHOP student (or admin) planning on attending? If so, leave a comment!
Does that agenda sound ok? Too boring? Missing stuff? What do you think?

Let's try and get a proposal together by next Friday, so I can get it into the folks.

Coming

add1sun (GHOP admin)
Bevan (GHOP mentor - usability tasks)
birdmanx35 (GHOP student)
chx (GHOP mentor - simpletest/benchmarking tasks, plus everything else ;))
cwgordon7 (GHOP student)
dmitrig01 (GHOP mentor/general helper-outer/awesome person :))
EclipseGc (GHOP mentor - theming/UI tasks)
webchick (GHOP admin)

Not sure

aclight (GHOP admin)
boombatower (GHOP student)

Not coming :(
* Corni (GHOP student)
* Corsix (GHOP student)
* kourge (GHOP student)

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

GHOP #136: Improve coder_format checklist

ezyang — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:44:36 +0000

This page is for tracking the findings of GHOP #136 in coder_format of the coder module.

Legend: See below.

includes/

File	Function	Issue	Status
		Remove spaces from lines with only whitespace	FIXED
actions.inc		Excessive spacing for assignment alignment	BOGUS
batch.inc		`$var =& func()` converted to `$var = &func()`	OK
bootstrap.inc		// Capitalize and punctuate inline comments.	POSTPONED
bootstrap.inc	watchdog	Array spacing collapsed	POSTPONED
cache.inc			OK
cache-install.inc			OK
common.inc	drupal_urlencode	// inside /* */ should not be triggered	FIXED
common.inc	drupal_urlencode	// inside '' should not be triggered	FIXED
common.inc	drupal_common_theme	Indent of closing parenthesis of an multi-line array should always have the same indent like the array key or the variable name, e.g. `<?php $var = array( 'install_page' => array( 'arguments' => array('content' => NULL), ), ); ?>` coder_preprocessor_ml_array_add_comma() should add a comma to multi-line array values, which required for `case ')'`.	FIXED
common.inc	element_sort	Hyphen in -1 should not be separated	FIXED
database.inc			OK
database.mysql.inc			OK
database.mysql-common.inc			OK
database.mysqli.inc	db_error	Wrong usage of inline comments /* */ (should be //) is moved below contextual line.	BOGUS
database.pgsql.inc			OK
file.inc	file_save_upload	Improper usage of inline comment in front of case statement.	BOGUS
file.inc	file_download	Negative sign in parenthesis should not have whitespace	FIXED
form.inc	theme_image_button	Long concatenated string merged to one line	BOGUS
form.inc	batch_get	function &foo() should not contain space between ampersand and name	FIXED
image.gd.inc			OK
image.inc			OK
install.inc	drupal_rewrite_settings	// inside // should not be triggered	FIXED
install.mysql.inc			OK
install.mysqli.inc			OK
install.pgsql.inc			OK
language.inc			OK
locale.inc	_locale_import_read_po	Proper inline comment (containing a colon and comma) is placed below statement.	FIXED
locale.inc	_locale_get_predefined_list	Improper usage of multiline comment as inline comment.	BOGUS
mail.inc	drupal_mail_send	Closing parenthesis should have same indent like return statement.	FIXED
menu.inc	menu_tree_page_data	Placements of while and while in a do ... while statement seem to be exchanged/corrupt.	FIXED
module.inc			OK
pager.inc			OK
path.inc			OK
session.inc			OK
tablesort.inc			OK
theme.inc			OK
theme.maintenance.inc			OK
unicode.inc			OK
xmlrpc.inc			OK
xmlrpcs.inc			OK

modules/

File	Function	Issue	Status
filter.module	_filter_htmlcorrector	Wrong formatting applied for accessing a single string character using the curly brace syntax.	FIXED
node.module	node_filter_form	postprocessor multiple_vars() should not match multiple lines that are separated by a blank line.	FIXED

Legend:
"BOGUS" means that the original code is considered wrong. coder_format follows a strict coding guideline and is not able to think like a human. This means that a developer has to write code (including comments) that is logically correct and basically follows these guidelines, too. For example, you should not wonder why something like

<?php
$foo = 'Hello word,'
  . 'this is some kind of'
  . 'ugly string concatenation.';
?>

will be re-formatted to

<?php
$foo = 'Hello word,' . 'this is some kind of' . 'ugly string concatenation.';
?>

If a developer really wanted to separate these strings onto multiple lines, a proper syntax should have been used:

<?php
$foo = 'Hello word,';
$foo .= 'this is some kind of';
$foo .= 'ugly string concatenation.';
?>

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

GHOP Students: Important reminders

aclight@drupal.org — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:24:10 +0000

Hello everyone

With GHOP 2007 getting close to the end, I want to remind the participating students of a few important points. If you're not a student, you don't need to read any further.

1.) The last date that a task can be claimed is January 22, 2008, 12:00 AM Pacific Time / 08:00 UTC. After that time, no further tasks can be claimed; you may continue to work on tasks you have already claimed. If you're currently working on a task and hope to finish one more before the program ends, make sure that you submit the work for your current task so that it can be reviewed and marked as closed by this deadline.

2.) All tasks must be completed and reviewed by February 4, 2008, 12:00 AM Pacific Time / 08:00 UTC.

See http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/faqs.html#tlq1 for more information about those above two deadlines.

3.) According to the official rules at http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/rules.html (section 6c), for a student to get credit for a task the student's work must be uploaded to the official Google GHOP task associated with that issue. This holds true for tasks that involved creating Drupal.org handbook pages, screencasts, etc. as well. If you have not done so already, please make sure that for each of your completed issues you have uploaded your work to the official Google task for that issue (on the code.google.com website). If you created a handbook page or some other type of web page for your task, you can just create a HTML file containing your work, and zip that along with any images or other content you produced and upload that.

If you created a video or screencast that is too large to be attached to your task, you should upload it to a Google owned video site (such as YouTube or Google Video) just to be safe. Include a link to the video on that site in the Google task.

If you have any questions about uploading your finished work or have problems along the way, please post replies here, and one of the GHOP administrators will try to get back to you as quickly as possible.

If you are feeling bored and want to help the admins out, you can go through the list of closed GHOP tasks at http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/issues/.... If you notice that a student has not already uploaded his/her finished work, just add a comment to the task reminding the student to do so and provide a link to this post for further information.

Again, please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks to each of you for your awesome work so far on this program, and keep up the good work.

Adam

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

New Drupal theme! (created as part of the GHOP contest)

ThatPerson@drupal.org — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:47:22 +0000

If you don't know what this is all about, check out the page on GHOP.

I've created a new tableless, CSS-based XHTML theme. It's a three-column, fluid layout, pictured to your right. No, it won't disappear into white like pictured, but it's still a good theme (in my opinion). If this seems exciting to you, read on...

Wow, this seems exciting!

Well, I'm glad you think so. If you want your own version of this theme, you can go and grab the theme through the GHOP issue page.

The theme should work on most modern browsers as of now. Wait, most?

Hey, is there a catch?

Well, yeah. The theme is almost complete, but I've got a couple of outstanding issues, including one big bug in IE7. (All the gory details are on the issue page in the link above). And, before you gripe that this theme borrowed a lot of elements from Garland, it's simply because I haven't gotten around to getting rid of the Garland-ness yet. The theme does take its layout code from Garland (because 1. I can't do fluid three-column layouts and 2. it works on IE 5.5) , though.

So, basically, since I can't solve this issue myself, I'd like to ask you, the community to help me solve it. Any takers?

I'd also like some comments on some other pressing matters, like:

Does the theme look good?
Is there enough contrast?
Can you find me a better name for the theme?

Enjoy!

Theme development

TinyMCE related GHOP task: TinyMCE defaults

billfitzgerald — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:17:41 +0000

The TinyMCE Defaults module: set up TinyMCE, along with secure input formats, with a mouse click.

Please give feedback on the issue: http://drupal.org/node/202062

@addisun/webchick/other GHOP admins: should I copy the task description over to the GHOP issue queue at http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-drupal/issues/... ?

TinyMCE Development

Coding task for GHOP

Bevan@drupal.org — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:06:34 +0000

I have been partially responsible for some abandon-ware in the viewfield.module that would be useful for others if it were integrated back into viewfield, or created as a new project. I'm not sure if it's too much or appropriate as a GHOP task. Can I please have some feedback? http://drupal.org/node/169692#comment-662613

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Issue Proposal: Atom feed views

deekayen — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:44:48 +0000

I am especially interested in whether or not this should just jump to Drupal 6 support. I'm not up on whether Views2 is far enough along for a GHOP project.

Summary: Port an old patch meant for Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5 so Atom module could support views (http://drupal.org/node/70596).

Views is a powerful module for creating customized data output. A patch was created for the Atom module in Drupal 4.7 so each view would be able to have an Atom feed, complete with a subscription link and icon. Such a feature would allow website administrators to create customized Atom feeds for data on their website. Otherwise the only Atom feeds available are the front page, blogs, or taxonomy terms.

What to do:
1. port the patch at http://drupal.org/node/70596 to work with the Drupal 5 version of the Atom and Views modules.
2. find a popular and free Atom icon to use instead of the RSS feed icon
3. referring to the original downside #2 in the issue, just print the feed link to the view's Atom feed, not two feeds
4. upload the patch back to http://drupal.org/node/70596 for review by an Atom module maintainer

References:

Atom module: http://drupal.org/project/atom
Views module: http://drupal.org/project/views
Drupal patches: http://drupal.org/patch

Expected time to completion: 3 days

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

New google tracker feature: Due Dates!

webchick — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 04:46:36 +0000

So anyone on the administration team knows that one of the most really un-fun things is going to each issue that's marked "Claimed", looking at the date the task was claimed, looking at the estimated time laid out, pulling out their abacus and fiddling with it for awhile, and coming up with whether or not they need to set the task as "ActionNeeded" or not. Also, going through all the "ActionNeeded" tasks and marking them as "Open" if it's been > 24 hours. Tons of fun, let me assure you.

So let's knock that off, with two new tricks!

Henceforth, all task timelines will be one week, unless other arrangements are made. This will allow for things like weekends, exams, or us dragging our feet reviewing things. Also, math is hard. Looking at a calendar is easy. ;)
When marking a task as "Claimed", give it a label like DueDate-2007-12-14. This will then show up as a nifty, sortable field in our issue tracker, so we can instantly see what tasks are overdue and need their statuses changed. Kudos to Moodle for this tip!

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

Interesting facts

webchick — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:57:56 +0000

We are now allowed up to 200 tasks, rather than the previous 102.
We are also allowed longer task frames than 5 days if we so choose. But bear in mind that tasks are tied up for the duration of their estimated time, so if we block off a task for 4 weeks and the student doesn't follow through, that effectively removes it from the contest. Shorter deadlines seem to be best, both for us and the students.
Google's approved the use of "Study problem X and define five tasks that could be done to fix
problem X."-type tasks, which can help some with the task numbers, and also let the students have somewhat of a say in this program. If you have time to write a formal task definition for this, and can think of what some of our Xs could be, please write up a task suggestion to the Drupal.org GHOP project issue queue.
Tasks students are interested in seem to be: Coding (especially making new stuff), "Build a $foo in Drupal" and document it tasks, security-related tasks, usability-related tasks. Basically, most things that exercise creativity.
Here are statistics of the program, updated every 2 hours: http://opentouch.info/tmp/ghop/ghop-stats.html. Currently, Plone is kicking everyone's butt with both the most completed and the highest number of tasks. Joomla! has by far the most students involved of any project. For the most part, this is correlation is directly tied to the number of tasks. Please help us create more tasks.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

I'd like to help with the administration of the GHOP program! How do I start?

webchick — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:55:50 +0000

GHOP is an amazing program that has already yielded some fantastic results. However, in order to continue the success of this program until the finish line (Feb. 4), we need your help!

There are three ways to help with the administration of the GHOP program:

Please note that students eligible for the GHOP contest are not allowed to propose tasks and such.

Read on to find out more...

#1: Review students' work

This is arguably the most important thing you can do to help with this program. If students submit their work, and it takes days for us to get back to them with either a thumbs-up or further suggestions, it's extremely demoralizing and frustrating. Additionally, it holds them up from taking on additional tasks, which means we get fewer helpful patches, documentation, and so on.

To help with this:

Hang out in #drupal-ghop on irc.freenode.net and provide advice. Students often have questions about how they should approach problems, and we need an army of people ready and willing to help them.
Keep tabs on tasks that need review. There's a (slightly imperfect) list at: http://drupal.org/project/issues/?text=GHOP&states=8. Ideally, we want this list to be zero, at all times, with tasks either marked "code needs work" (if there's still work to be done) or "ready to be committed/fixed" if they're complete.
Review students' work thoroughly. For code, test not only that the solution works but also that it conforms to coding standards and security best-practices. For documentation, ensure the message is communicated clearly and has been checked over for spelling/grammar mistakes.
If you can't review the work, please track down someone who can. For example, you might not know enough about the Foo module to review a patch for it, but if the maintainer of the Foo module is in IRC, ping him/her to look at the task.
Provide clear instructions for what is left to be done before task is "complete" There's nothing worse than having your task marked "code needs work" and not being sure how to complete a task. Be specific in what it will take for them to have another task under their belt.
If a task is complete, mark it as such in the Google task ticket. This means changing its status to "Closed." If you don't have permissions, track down anyone listed as a Project Owner/Project Member at our official GHOP project page.

#2: Propose (and review) new tasks

Our students have been absolutely fantastic and are whipping through tasks faster than we can create them. So we need to make sure we have ongoing pipeline of interesting, fun, and challenging tasks available. In particular, tasks around coding, usability, and "recipe"-style documentation have been popular, since they require creativity.

Propose proper, full tasks, not task ideas. We need tasks written up according to the task guidelines.
Post an issue to the Drupal.org GHOP project's issue queue with your task write-up (check first if it exists already, here and here). The admins and the rest of the community can then review the task and suggest revisions.
If not already a member, track down one of the admins to add you as a member to the Google task tracker. People listed at our official GHOP project page as "Project owners" can add additional members, and people listed as "Project members" are able to propose official tasks.
Once the task proposal is marked 'ready to be committed', create an issue for the task in whatever queue is appropriate. For example, "Drupal" for core-related tasks, "Documentation" for documentation-related tasks, etc. Title it "GHOP #xx: Title of task here" and expand the "Categories" fieldset and give it the "GHOP" tag.
Also add it to the Google task tracker. Bear in mind that tasks cannot be edited once they are entered here, so make sure to get it right the first time. ;) Give it the Status of "Open", label it according to the type of task ("Code", "Documentation", etc.), and add a "DrupalIssue-###" label as well, which references the corresponding drupal.org issue. Remove all other labels.
Go back to the drupal.org issue and update the title with the GHOP issue number. Yes, this is kind of a pain in the butt. Sorry, but we've found that people don't follow code.google.com. :(

#3: Assist in follow up

We can only ensure the best results from this program when tasks are managed in a timely fashion. Your goal as a co-administrator is simple: keep tabs on the task queue and change statuses accordingly.

Helping with this entails:

Follow task updates Either subscribe to or keep tabs on the task list update e-mails at http://groups.google.com/group/drupal-ghop-2007.
If not already a member, track down one of the admins to add you as a member to the Google task tracker. People listed at our official GHOP project page as "Project owners" can add additional members, and people listed as "Project members" are able to propose official tasks.
Check for validity of task claims. Please note the following, which is from the contest rules:
- The student must state exactly the phrase: "I claim this Task." Any variations to that line do not count as a claim. At the same time, we've been accepting task claims if there is other text in the comment in addition to "I claim this task".
- The first student to state this exact phrase on the task, provided they are eligible (see below), can be awarded the task. If that student fails to execute on a task, it then goes to the next student to claim it. And so on.
- A student may only work on one task at a time. Tasks aren't considered done until they're marked "Closed". Check the Google issue tracker to ensure the student's name doesn't appear there (you're also technically supposed to check the issue trackers of all the other projects' trackers, too).
Mark tasks that pass all the above as "Claimed". To do this, change the task's Status to "Claimed" and add a Label "ClaimedBy-student_handle.
Check for tasks that are nearing deadlines. Each task comes with a timeframe on it (usually between 2 and 5 days). If a student is nearing the end of that, especially if they've not given any status indication on their progress, change its status to "ActionNeeded" and leave a polite note indicating that you need an update from them.
Move tasks from "ActionNeeded" to "Open" if a student hasn't come by within 24-48 hours of the status change. Note: we do give some leeway if things come up and the student's told us about it.
Monitor GHOP tasks on drupal.org that need status changes. You can view a (somewhat buggy) list of all GHOP tasks at http://drupal.org/project/issues/?text=GHOP. In particular, check for tasks that aren't properly marked "needs review" so we can get eyes on them.
Fill in missing details, for example drupal.org issues missing the "GHOP" tag, or google issues missing the DrupalIssue tag, etc.
Contact people for task ideas and reviews. Unglamorous, but infinitely helpful.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)