Here are some factoids about the GHOP/Python project, from the end of the first 30 hours.

Of 63 tasks, 32 remain unclaimed.

26 tasks have been claimed by students and are being worked on; some of those are nearing completion.

5 have already been completed: all three Rosetta Code tasks (which has made Python the language with the most rosetta code examples!), a translation of Crunchy into Estonian (!?), and some new (and helpful!) example code for the ConfigParser docs.

Projecting this activity level into the future, I predict that our current tasks will be exhausted within two weeks, and even if we fill up to 102 tasks (the maximum) those will be completed by sometime in mid December.

So, I asked Leslie Hawthorn (Google) if we could increase our task limit to 200, and she agreed. I will soon be sending solicitations out to specific projects asking for task suggestions and mentors. I would welcome tasks from other projects, too, so please consider sending them to us!

Incidentally, one complaint I saw on slashdot is that there aren't enough "good" coding tasks. Now, I can't speak for the Python community, but if I were you I wouldn't take that kind of abuse...

--titus

p.s. As you can tell I'm excited about all of this, largely because it's been surprisingly good fun. The students are all very interested and motivated, and it's a pleasure to interact with them. Plus, stuff's actually getting done!

p.p.s. Some of the current mentors (Doug Hellmann, Georg Brandl, Andre Roberge) are real machines, but we could use some help interacting with the participants... hint hint.