Google Code-In (GHOP v2.0)

Greetings, Usability Team!

Just wanted to raise to your attention that Google is sponsoring a program to help 13-18 year olds get involved in open source called Google Code-In:http://code.google.com/opensource/gci/2010-11/index.html. The program runs Nov. 22 - January 10, and the past incarnation (GHOP) netted us rockstars such as Jimmy Berry (who wrote the infrastructure for our automated testing bot), Daniel Wehner (who is now a Views co-maintainer), and Charlie Gordon (who has done a bunch of work in core on SimpleTest and D7UX patches).

We're currently in the "apply as a mentoring organization" status, and in order to do that, we need a list of tasks in eight categories (Code, Documentation, Outreach, Quality Assurance, Research, Training, Translation, and User Interface) that someone in jr. high/high school could pick off in a week or so. This task list is due next Friday, and I'd love to have at least 25-30 tasks in a variety of areas ready to go well in advance of that.

Unlike Google Summer of Code, usability work is 100% A-OK in this program. So if there are initiatives hanging around that are kind of stalled out that might have new life breathed into them by a young, eager student, and there are folks here willing to do some hand-holding with them, that'd be awesome. Some examples I can think of are maybe mocking up a new modules page in core for Drupal 8, cleaning up some particularly nasty screen in a contributed module, or perhaps doing some usability testing with their parents and reporting the results.

I want to caution though that we need to put some thought into our task list and not just make 50 "User test Drupal 7 with your parents" tasks. This program isn't about getting free child labour, it's about inspiring the next generation of open source contributors. Further, it's very obvious to students (and Google, for that matter) how much work mentoring organizations put into their task list and a lame copy/paste job (which is what we'll have to resort to if we can't find enough good tasks :) is likely to get students heading off to another project.

So, if you can help, please see instructions at http://groups.drupal.org/node/101019. We currently have 0 viable tasks, and only two task suggestions, so any help we can get here is appreciated. :(

Thanks.