New Zealand High Schoolers: Put Google on your CV this Summer!
Wellington 29, November 2007
New Zealand high-schoolers are being given a once in lifetime opportunity to work with Google over December and January in a computing contest with the lure of money, Google T-Shirts, and travel.
Wellington-based software company SilverStripe is one of 10 organisations invited by Google to be at the core of the global "Google Highly Open Participation Contest".
Students choose to work on small tasks which get contributed back into high profile global software projects. Participants get a Google T-Shirt and USD100 for every three tasks completed. The top ten students get an all-expenses-paid trip to an awards ceremony at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley.
Tasks vary from programming, testing, design, and translating, to marketing. The contest aims to teach appreciation for the progressive software ideals that Google, and other open source companies like SilverStripe, are founded upon. Says SilverStripe co-founder Sigurd Magnusson:
In today's daily commentary about global warming and people's wariness of the greed held by large music, oil, banking, and software giants, companies like Google are boldly demonstrating how to make money and still operate for the human good. With Google Earth, for example, Google purchased millions of dollars of satellite photography to then release the world's best mapping tool. By making it free, Google genuinely improved the world we live in. Through this contest, Google hopes to teach the next generation to appreciate the importance of collaboration, open standards, and freedom of information—and encourage them to live by the same ideals.
SilverStripe was invited into this contest because we've shown through our earlier collaboration with Google that we share the same philosophy; like Google, we're showing the world how to run a profitable, world-leading company that takes a more human approach; giving massively useful software to the world.
Students must complete their work by 4th February 2008 to allow grand prize winners to be judged.
SilverStripe makes a world-leading web development platform that is both cutting edge and easy to use. SilverStripe uses an open source development model to continuously expand the platform. Since the platform's launch in February, generous support has been received from Google, Sun, the NZ Government, and in the form of hundreds of volunteers worldwide contributing new code, ideas, translations, and testing. SilverStripe is financed by working with progressive Government and private organizations who want sophisticated web applications built on top of the platform.