How cool is this - a South African (Capetonian, at that) student, Federico Lorenzi, placed in the top 10 of the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest.  Federico has good taste - he likes FreeBSD and Python - and worked on the MoinMoin wiki project for the contest.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest is a way to introduce pre-university students to the world of open source, and to reward the contributions made by these students.  The winners get flown over to Google's Mountain View headquarters for a prize-giving.

In conjunction with Charl van Niekerk's Google Summer of Code participation, the fact that South Africa has a wealth of technical talent is probably reaching many more ears.  (I'm sure Google isn't surprised - I know a few South Africans doing good work there.)