Hello everyone,

My name is Jason Dreyzehner, and I am the Virginia State Vice President of the Virginia Association of the Technology Student Association.

"The Technology Student Association is an international middle and high school student organization 150,000 strong with regional, state, and (Inter)national conferences. With competitive events from prepared presentation to fashion design, from music and film production to web development and programming challenges, and leadership opportunities geared toward preparing you for anything from public speaking to a life of leadership, the TSA encompasses nearly every career and area of interest in today's world."

Recently I and many of my peers have become interested in open source software usage and development, and used Joomla! in the TSA's Cyberspace Pursuit Competition (We placed second internationally only to a school from Germany). Since then, I have redesigned the Virginia TSA website using Joomla!; giving Virginia TSA a direct interest in the success and further development of the project. After some discussion with another student from my school, I drafted the attached competition guidelines in the hopes of creating a "Open Source Software Development" competition.

Due to the nature and radical difference between this event and most of TSA's other events, I figured it was only appropriate to post the outline in an open source fashion. If you are interested in having a part in the development of the competition, please read the attached guidelines.

I have a few questions that I would like to address to everyone:

first and foremost, does anyone have any better ideas as to the judging of the competition? Specifically, wording of the "Evaluative Criteria?" I must leave the competition as open as possible, and there will be no way of separating and awarding participants in its 3 areas differently.

Also, this is definitely easier, but I want to get everyone's opinion. What Careers are related to "Open Source Software Development?" I know there are probably hundreds, but I need to narrow this down to a good list of five or so.

If you have any other suggestions, please let me know- we want this to be as successful as possible in its first few years.

I hope that my organization will be able to push open source to higher levels, especially considering the fact that a large number of open source developers are students. I look forward to seeing the impact that maybe only small group of knowledgeable students can make on an open source project.

Finally, not to be advertising or anything, but if your a middle or high school student, geek or not, we surely have a competition that you will enjoy. Please take a look at a short description of the over 60 different competitive events that we host. If your school does not have a TSA chapter, please talk to a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curriculum teacher about starting your own. Also, if you would be interested in participating in such an event, please message me and look in to the creation of your chapter (My first chapter consisted of me and two friends who knew nothing about a website). I am going out on a limb within my organization, and many of the other officers think this will fall flat for lack of participation; we need as many teams as possible if this is to ever have the positive effect of which it is capable.

Thank you very much,
Jason Dreyzehner
Virginia TSA Vice President