DROP: Making Drupal awesome, one task at a time

We had a lot of fun putting together our <a href="http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-54-contributing">podcast on contributing to Drupal</a>. In it, we provided some insight into the overall Drupal community philosophy, we listed some of the most important advantages to contributing, and we also noted all of the vastly different ways in which to go about it. The point to drive home is that <em>everyone</em> -- regardless of skillset, experience, or "code know-how" -- has something to offer the Drupal project, and become part of the force driving the project forward, rather than standing on the side and observing.

But there's one important aspect of contributing that we didn't manage to get into, due to lack of time. And that's the question of:

<strong>How do I take those critical first steps in becoming a contributor to Drupal?</strong>

If you find yourself asking yourself that question (or you have an interest in helping other people to answer it), then <a href="http://drop.cwgordon.com/">DROP</a> is for you.

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<h2>What is DROP?</h2>
DROP (Drupal <em>Really</em> Open Participation) is a Drupal community program that was created by some of the students who participated in the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. Both GHOP and DROP share the main goal of creating a library of fun, interesting, and low-barrier-to-entry tasks (estimated to take a week or less) in almost any category you can think of: coding,  documentation, research, marketing, training, etc.

However, DROP differs from GHOP in the following key ways:

<ul>
<li><strong>DROP is for everyone!</strong> GHOP was restricted to students age 13 and higher who were still in secondary school. DROP removes this requirement, and everyone from the very young (like our friend dmitrig01) to the very old can claim a task. :)</li>
<li><strong>DROP was built by and for the Drupal community.</strong> </li>
<li></li>
</ul>

<h2>So, how does it work?</h2>




 as an attempt to take the best aspects of that program, strip out the administrative stuff, and . In a nutshell, DROP creates a framework for highlighting low barrier-to-entry tasks in the community, ranging from graphic design work to 


GHOP (Google Summer students.