A similar experiment was done 20 years ago or so in France. It was called the Centre Mondial de l'Informatique et des Ressources Humaines aka CMI. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_mondial_inf... (in French). Many people that are now leading the IT and Open Source industries in France have spent countless hours at the CMI and another similar institution (Palais de la Découverte, a kind of a science museum).

With computers being in most homes (at least in the Western World), and Open Source enabling kids to participate to real-world projects is changing a lot of things, hopefully for the better. They don't have to wait to be 25 to participate to things that matter, and being the first generation of digital natives, they're going to challenge their elders with their new approach and new expectations.

not sure if I'm understanding what you mean here, but what I get after reading your prose is that Open Source enable young people to get engaged in cool projects before they get a job.

I just have been reading in another tab of my Firefox the following article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/mal... , which basically says that smart people who can practice a subject for 10,000 hours before the age of 20 have more chances to become geniuses. (Of course it's much more complex than this, but you get the gist).

So maybe Open-Source is currently producing the next generation of geniuses without us noticing it yet!