Frederico Lorenzi, a 17-year-old South African, has won one of 10 grand prizes in Google's Highly Open Participation open source contest.
The contest was open to all pre-university students worldwide, who were free to contribute source code, documentation, training materials or user experience research to any of the open source projects earmarked for attention.
Lorenzi chose MoinMoin, an open source wiki engine, because he was familiar with Python, the language in which it was programmed.
"I felt that because I had used MoinMoin before, I could get up to speed with what was required far more quickly," he adds.
For his submission, Lorenzi was given "commit rights" to MoinMoin, meaning he could change small bits of source code without having to submit them for discussion.
Lorenzi will receive an all-expenses-paid tour to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
Google's country manager, Stafford Masie, says: "It just goes to show that SA has a great deal of talent to offer the world. Through future contests of this nature, we aim to continue driving that point home."
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