Ha, what a coincidence. ;) I just posted a status update on my blog, although it's looking more at the positive side of things: http://webchick.net/node/10
On the not-so-sunny side of things, there are three main things that we desperately need help with in order to make this program a success:
1. First and foremost, we need people to be on top of reviewing students' work and providing feedback/answering questions/etc. There are currently tasks in the queue which have gone unreviewed for 48+ hours. This is BAD, not only for the students who get needlessly locked up in tasks (they can't take on a new one until their current one is marked "Closed"), but also for us because we look like jerks who don't care. Plus the work doesn't get done nearly as fast.
2. We need a few reliable individuals with attention to detail and time on their hands throughout the day to handle the extremely tedious (but also extremely important) administrative crapola: shuffling tasks between statuses, pinging primary contacts and students when they're not keeping on top of their issues, syncing the code.google.com activity with drupal.org activity, etc. This is not particularly taxing work, but it is time consuming, and really needs to be stayed on top of for the contest to move forward.
3. We also need people to take the time to write quality, thoughtful tasks. Lots of people will suggest vague concepts/ideas, but very, *very* few take the time to write them up to the level of detail that we need. Even if we had people whose job it was to go and annoy people for these vague task ideas and then *they* take the time to write them up, that would be a huge help. I'm trying to make it a point to have Drupal's issue queue have very interesting/creative/fun tasks, because so far most of the students we've attracted as a result of our task list have been fantastic.
That said, I'm less enthusiastic about adding another 150 tasks for us to manage until we get the scalability problems of #1 and #2 sorted. And #2 is arguably *more* important than #1, at least right at the moment, because if the small group of GHOP admins weren't spending 6+ hours a day doing #2, we could be spending them on #1 instead. ;)