Joanmarie Diggs has worked for the Carroll Center for the Blind for the last 14 years, helping visually impaired people learn to use assistive technology. She decided to teach herself programming in order to contribute to Orca, GNOME’s screen reader. She eventually became the maintainer of Orca. Exactly a month ago, she was hired to work on GNOME accessibility at Igalia within 4 hours of posting on Twitter that her grant-funded position at the Carroll Center had been cut.

Joanie’s tweets are always infused with a great deal of humor. She says “Random thought: I wonder if I’ll ever shovel snow again….” in the wake of her move from New Hemisphere to Spain. Joanie has been a very caring mentor for one of the participants in the recent round of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. She is the best role model I know for any woman getting involved in GNOME development.

Máirín Duffy is an interaction designer at Red Hat. She has a strong commitment to graphic design with free software. She has been using 100% free software to create her designs for many years now and has created many resources and opportunities for others to learn free software graphic design tools.

Máirín created the Fedora Design Bounty project to provide people interested in contributing to Fedora design with well-defined tasks suitable for beginners. She created some great flyers and art work to promote the Fedora Design Suite spin at SXSW. She ran Gimp and Inkscape classes for local middle school students and for Girl Scouts, creating great resources for both. Helping Máirín with the Girl Scout classes and going over these resources was actually how I learned do useful things in Gimp and Inkscape.

Máirín has showcased 17 open fonts in an “Unpackaged Font of the Week” series in her blog. There is always some fun and inviting project she talks about in her blog, accompanied by great pictures, designs, and educational resources.

Jessica McKellar is a recent MIT graduate who works at Ksplice. She organizes Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends. These workshops assume no prior knowledge of programming and walk the attendees through the installation steps, basic Python constructs, interactive programming exercises, and small projects during a 1.5 day event. Jessica explains programming in an engaging way and she and other volunteers help the attendees with any stumbling blocks throughout the event. These workshops get filled up within days of being announced and, in response, have grown in the number of attendees they accommodate. Being able to learn how to program in a supportive environment where any setback is resolved within minutes is tremendously empowering to the attendees. Jessica has found a great approach for helping more women feel confident about learning to program and the detailed materials she has created are now used for similar workshops in other cities.

Jessica is one of the maintainers of OpenHatch, a community website that provides the information and teaches the necessary skills for getting involved in free software. Open Source Workshop is another event Jessica recently organized together with Asheesh Laroia, who is the creator of OpenHatch. This workshop walked the attendees through the basics of free software contributing and gave them hands-on experience with using IRC, working with patches, and triaging bugs. Participating in such events gives the attendees the necessary confidence to make their next steps in the free software world. The first step is often the hardest and the community events Jessica puts together help many people make it.

Stormy Peters is the Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla. Before that she was the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. After leaving that position, she ran for the 7 person GNOME board as soon as she had a chance, coming in first with the largest number of top votes. Stormy is also the founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in schools where kids have no other access to technology. Her leadership and ability to connect people is a great gift for all the organizations she is involved with.

Stormy has been my go-to person for the last two years in which we have been working on the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. She championed the need to revive the women outreach initiative in GNOME and has helped with everything from getting sponsorship to answering applicant inquiries. It’s a great luxury to know that I can get sound and helpful advice from her about anything related to the program. When not bouncing ideas off of Stormy, I like reading her blog posts. They are just as insightful, both on matters related to free software and on other things in life.

Unlike what is considered typical for Google Summer of Code projects, you don’t need to come up with an idea for a stand-alone project for your intern. Instead, we’d like the interns to start with smaller tasks (i.e. bugs) and progress over time to more complex tasks (i.e. features), with each task being suggested by you based on the current priorities of your team. Ensuring that the interns work on manageable and relevant tasks helps with the important goal of getting their work incorporated into the projects during the internship period.

Having your project listed among the participating projects might help bring in a new contributor this round or at some later point. We encourage women interested in contributing to contact mentors for the participating projects at any time during the year. So please add your project now!

Just how awesome were the interns in our last round? Here is a summary of their impressive accomplishments. Thanks to them and to their mentors for making it such a successful round!

We had 8 Outreach Program for Women interns.

Aline Duarte Bessa wrote new topic-based help for Accerciser, an interactive tool that allows GNOME applications to check what accessibility information they are providing. She wrote documentation for the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is used to provide a description of an application to accessibility tools. She examined the entire Accerciser bug list, provided feedback on all the bugs, and created patches for many of them. She also wrote a demo widget that explored accessibility issues. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Meg Ford created 81 new icons and edited 241 existing icons. Along with the Symbolic theme icons, they complete the High Contrast and High Contrast inverse themes for GNOME. [1, 2]

Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote new topic-based help for the Vinagre remote desktop viewer and Brasero CD/DVD burner. She also was one of the key organizers of the Desktop Summit in Berlin. [1, 2, 3]

Julita Inca wrote new topic-based help for the Cheese webcam application and some general desktop help. [1, 2]

Yu Liansu created a comprehensive GNOME Visual Identity portfolio, including a lot of original art work, posters, brochures, presentation and web page templates. [1, 2, 3]

Priscilla Mahlangu added a Zulu translation for GNOME, translating over 35 core modules. [1]

Anita Reitere created guidelines and compiled resources for writing better help and for starting to contribute to GNOME documentation. She also wrote a detailed analysis of Empathy help. [1, 2, 3]

Kelly Sinnott wrote new topic-based help for GNOME System Monitor and some general desktop help. She identified the need to provide GNOME help on mobile devices and created a prototype website. [1, 2, 3, 4]

We also had 7 Google Summer of Code interns, who were encouraged and supported by the Outreach Program for Women.

Tiffany Antopolski wrote a contact chooser for collaborative viewing of documents in Evince. She also wrote some general desktop help. [1, 2]

Tamara Atanasoska improved the Anjuta IDE integration with version control system operations and implemented opening an included file by clicking on the include statement. [1, 2]

Neha Doijode implemented correctly removing message sources from the message tray and showing images in notifications in GNOME Shell. [1]

Nohemi Fernandez implemented a full-featured on-screen keyboard for GNOME Shell. [1]

Raluca Elena Podiuc added the ability to create an avatar in Empathy with a webcam or to select an avatar from standard or previously used avatars. She also added support for video effects when using video chat in Empathy. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Srishti Sethi created 4 activities for children to discover Braille for GCompris educational software. [1]

Madhumitha Viswanathan added Google Calendar, Google Tasks and Tracks backends to the Getting Things GNOME! task management software. [1]

In addition to their contributions, many of the interns participated in GNOME events. Julita, Kelly, and Tiffany attended the Open Help conference and GNOME Documentation hackfest in Cincinnati. Ekaterina, Julita, Anita, Tiffany, Tamara, Raluca, Srishti, and Madhumitha attended the Desktop Summit in Berlin. Meg, Tiffany, and Nohemi are coming to the Montreal Summit. The new participants and their contributions are definitely energizing the GNOME project!

It is particularly important that people heading to the Software Freedom Day in places in the Southern Hemisphere help us spread the word. The December to March internship dates are aimed at the college women there who will have a school summer break during this time.

However, because any woman who is available for a full-time internship is welcome to apply, you might reach just the right candidate by letting people know about the program in Kokkola, Finland (the northernmost place on the SFD events map). For a similar round last year, we had two participants from Brazil and a participant each from Argentina, Canada, Chile, India, Malaysia, and USA.

The application deadline is October 31. During the program, the interns work remotely, while being guided by a mentor. The participating projects include ones in programming, graphic design, documentation, and marketing.

I would like to personally thank all program sponsors, Collabora, Google, Mozilla and the GNOME Foundation! Thank you to Red Hat for supporting my work on this program! Thank you to Máirín Duffy, Stormy Peters, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors for the help and support in organizing this program. Thank you to Sumana Harihareswara, Dave Neary and Owen Taylor for helping me prepare the press release. Most importantly, thank you to all the program’s mentors for doing the essential work of helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects!

What struck me while reviewing the applications was how this program presented a special opportunity for each participant. They all had previous experience with GNOME and Free Software, worked hard to prepare their applications, and saw the program as a great fit that will allow them to take their involvement in Free Software and their professional accomplishments to the next level. So far I shared two tips with them. Being told to read the code is normal. As are multiple passes in a patch review. Please welcome them when you see them on Planet GNOME and point them to the right line of code when they have a question on IRC .

GNOME 3 is awesome! We are already thinking ahead too.

The GNOME Foundation will be sponsoring three more internships for women from May 23 to August 22, 2011. These dates match the ones for the Google Summer of Code program, so that we can also encourage women who qualify for Google Summer of Code to apply for both programs. Google Summer of Code requires applicants to be students applying for coding projects, while Outreach Program for Women internships are open to non-students and non-coders. For example, three out of eight interns last round were non-students, and two others worked on the Documentation Project.

The application deadline is April 8, 2011. As part of the application process, we are asking women to take the time to learn about the participating projects and make a small contribution to the one they are interested in. These projects include ones in programming, graphic design, documentation, and marketing.

This deadline is a little over three weeks away, so immediate help with spreading the word about the program is hugely appreciated. You can e-mail the program information to the relevant departments at your university or to a technical women group, post the flyer at your university or hand it out at a conference you are attending. Perhaps, you even personally know somebody who should apply! The linked page has the text for the e-mail you can send to people, the flyer you can attach to an e-mail or print out, and even a sample dent / tweet !

As always, people are welcome to add their projects to the list of participating projects and add themselves as mentors. Companies are encouraged to sponsor additional internships on the projects of their choice.

Thanks to Máirín Duffy for updating the flyer during a stop-over en route to SXSW!

Before the holidays, I finished implementing support for two other types of notification behavior: resident and transient. Resident notifications are available to the user even after the user has interacted with them or with the application that sent them. On the other hand, transient notifications are not kept around for the user at all after they are initially shown.

Jon McCann has updated the Desktop Notification Specification to expose these new features to applications. The “persistence” capability advertised by the notification server means that the notifications are persistent by default and that resident and transient notifications are supported. “resident” and “transient” hints on the notifications are used to mean that the notification should be resident or transient.

Resident notifications often go along with rich controls in notifications. Rhythmbox notifications are a good example. During his GSoC, Matt Novenstern came up with a way of specifying icons to be used as notification’s actions, enabled this feature in GNOME Shell, and wrote a patch for using icons for the playback buttons in Rhythmbox notifications. Jon has updated the Desktop Notification Specification to reflect this feature. When the notification server has the “action-icons” capability and the notification has the “action-icons” hint set, named icons that match the action identifiers are used for the notification’s action buttons.

Putting it all together, Jonathan Matthew has reviewed and pushed Matt’s patch for playback icons and made Rhythmbox notifications resident. Resident behavior of Rhythmbox notifications allows the user to see what’s playing and use the playback controls at any time. Incidentally, Jonathan has also worked on the GNOME Shell side of things, coming up with the initial patch for the resident notifications support.

Empathy chat notifications are also resident in GNOME Shell. Because they allow chatting inline in the text entry field they contain, making them resident enables the user to continue a conversation at any time.

The resident behavior and rich features of Rhythmbox and Empathy notifications help minimize the distraction from intermittent events. They allow the user to react to such events at the user’s own convenience and without switching away from the window the user is working in.

Applications should use resident notifications if they are so heavily notification based that the user would expect to see a notification in the tray most of the time and use the application by interacting with its notification’s rich features. In this case, the user should be able to reliably find the notification and not have to guess if there is one in the tray or not.

The other new type of notifications, transient notifications which don’t stay around in the message tray, are mainly intended for use by the system components that have a permanent representation elsewhere, such as in the system status area in the top panel. For example,  non-critical battery information notifications are transient.

Transient notifications can also be used as a feedback for the user’s action within the system. For example, they are used when the user adds or removes a favorite application in the Activities Overview mode and allow undoing the action.

Persistent and resident notifications enable complete interaction between the user and the application using only notifications. In GNOME 2, authors would use GtkStatusIcon to anchor the information shown in the notifications, but this is no longer necessary and the applications should move away from the GtkStatusIcon usage. The suggestions for individual applications and system components can be found in these compatibility guidelines. Please find us on #gnome-shell IRC if you would like to discuss the use of the notifications by your application in GNOME 3 or help out with the message tray features.

One of our requirements for applicants was to make a contribution to the project they are interested in. All of our selected participants succeeded in making a good non-trivial contribution, so we know they are ready to dive into their work! They all share great enthusiasm for their projects, GNOME, and free software. Please meet:

Tiffany Antopolski (mimico) has completed her third year of Software Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, which is near Toronto, in Canada. She is taking this year to do a co-op position, in which she is teaching sessions and labs in a first year programming course. Tiffany has also helped design the curriculum for the course. She will work on the Documentation Project with Paul Cutler as her mentor.

Nanci de Brito Bonfim (nanci) is a graduate student in Computer Science at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. As one of her previous involvements with free software, Nanci has been filing bugs and working on quality assurance tests for BrOffice.org, a Brazilian Portuguese version of OpenOffice.org. Nanci has used Anjuta before for programming in C. She will work on Anjuta with Sébastien Granjoux as her mentor.

Luciana Fujii Pontello (fujii) has graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2006. Luciana is one of the main developers of Landell, a free software multimedia streaming tool developed using Python, GTK+, and GStreamer. She has also developed the cairoimageoverlay plugin for GStreamer for overlaying an image over a video. She has first peeked into the Cheese code earlier this year when learning how to write a GStreamer application. Luciana is leaving her current job as a developer working on Landell at Holoscopio, a small free software consulting and development company, because of her interest to work directly with GNOME. She will work on improving libcheese and GNOME Video Effects with Thiago Sousa Santos as her mentor.

Eugenia Gabrielova (genia) has recently graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, which is near Chicago, in USA. She currently works as a Research Software Developer at the Northwestern University Medical Simulation Lab, creating a video game about emergency medicine for medical students. She is a sole developer on this project and is developing it on an Ubuntu system using Python. Eugenia has used Anjuta before for her school assignments. Eugenia will work on Anjuta with Johannes Schmid as her mentor.

Laura Elisa Lucas Alday (stringlau) is a fourth year Computer Science student at the John F. Kennedy Argentine University in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Laura has five years of full-time professional software engineering experience using Visual C/C++ for applications related to video management and computer security. She has used many free software applications and libraries while working in the Windows environment and has been using Ubuntu at home. She is currently staying at home with her five months old son Rafael. Laura will work on Cheese with Daniel Siegel as her mentor.

Hellyna Ng (hellyna) is a third and final year student in the Digital Systems Security program at the University of Wollongong. She is taking her courses through the Singapore Institute of Management Global Education program. She lives in Johor, Malaysia and commutes to Singapore for school. Hellyna has used Arch Linux, (K)(X)Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Linux Mint, and Sabayon Linux distributions. She has previously compiled the kernel and built from scratch Arch Linux and Gentoo distributions. She’ll be taking a term off at school to participate in the program. She will work on GNOME Shell with me as her mentor.

Natalia Andrea Ruz Leiva (nruz) is a fourth year Computer Science student at the Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaíso, Chile. Natalia participates in the development of the Guitar Boost free software video game for learning to play electric guitar by connecting it to the computer and following the tablature on the screen that shows how the song is played. Natalia will work on the Documentation Project with Paul Cutler as her mentor.

Chandni Verma (glassrose) has recently graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Dr. M.C. Saxena College of Engineering & Technology in Lucknow, India. She is particularly interested in data structures, algorithms and cryptography, and has worked on school projects involving them, such as an online national polling system. Chandni also maintains a library with her implementations of over a 100 different algorithms and participates in various online programming contests. Chandni learned about this internship program when already working on her first contribution to Empathy. She will work on Empathy with Danielle Madeley as her mentor.

There are many people and organizations I’d like to thank for making this program happen! Thank you to the GNOME Board of Directors for expressing a desire to run this program and for providing funding for three participants! Thank you to Google for funding four more participants and to Collabora for funding one more participant! Special thank you to Stormy Peters for providing me with irreplaceable feedback day in and day out! Thank you to Paul Cutler, Danielle Madeley, Johannes Schmid, and Daniel Siegel, who in addition to signing up as mentors from day one helped a lot with planning the program and working with the applicants! Thank you to Sébastien Granjoux and Thiago Sousa Santos who stepped in as mentors on a last minute request and saved the day! Thank you to Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach for running a trailblazing Women’s Summer Outreach Program in 2006, showing that it generates a lot of interest, and providing us with great input for this program! Thank you to Máirín Duffy for designing an awesome logo and flyer! Thank you to Emily Chen, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Amber Graner, Rikki Kite, Pockey Lam, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Izabel Valverde, Marco Villegas and everyone else who helped spread the word! Thank you to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier for working on the press release with me and Stormy! Thank you to Rosanna Yuen for helping figure out how the payments for the program will work! Thank you to Jonathan Blandford, Jon McCann, and Owen Taylor at Red Hat for being very supportive of my work on this!

Finally, thank you to our participants for showing up and being so enthusiastic about this program! Congratulations and rock on! Thank you to everyone else who applied and worked on project contributions! Please stay involved in GNOME and apply next time if we couldn’t accept you this time around.

The application deadline is October 25, 2010. As part of the application process, we are asking women to take the time to learn about the participating projects and make a contribution to the one they are interested in. These projects include ones in programming, graphic design, documentation, and marketing.

Here is the program flyer designed by Máirín Duffy!

I’d like to ask people in the GNOME community to help with the women outreach effort in these two ways:

Be a mentor – Add your project to the list of projects participating in the program. This list is not only intended as a list of possible internship projects, but also as a list of friendly contacts who women who find out about GNOME can ask for help anytime throughout the year. Even though it goes without saying that all GNOME projects welcome new contributors, just having the text that speaks directly to women will give them the extra encouragement to get involved!

Spread the word – Especially if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you know best which universities and organizations we should send the information to. You can post the program flyer at your university or hand it out at a conference you are attending. Perhaps, you even personally know somebody who should apply! The linked page has the text for the e-mail you can send to people, the flyer you can attach to an e-mail or print out, and even a sample dent / tweet !

Thank you for your help!

The reason we need to have information and opportunities targeted specifically towards women is that this will get more of them involved.  It will allow more of them to learn how exciting, varied and valuable work on GNOME can be and how inclusive the community really is.

We already have a good list of mentors for the program and would love to have more sign up, so please add your name to the list if you are interested. A couple women have already come across the information about the program and gotten in touch with the mentors. Their involvement with the projects and guidance from the mentors can start now, which means that the program is basically providing them with the information on how to get started contributing to GNOME and a friendly contact for the questions they will likely have. We are encouraging students and mentors to work together before the application period, so that the students are well familiar with the projects before they apply for the internships and the mentors have the contributions they can take into account during the selection process.

Having summer internships with GNOME will create an opportunity for women to dedicate more time to their work on free software and make a greater contribution to the project. We would like to have these opportunities available in addition to the Google Summer of Code because this will allow us to have a more focused program and will ensure that more women learn about and participate in it. Moreover, we would like the new program to include non-programming projects such as graphics design, interaction design, documentation, and marketing. We are also considering organizing the program so that participants can work as part of the team starting with smaller contributions and progressing to larger ones, rather than working on stand-alone projects. This is more similar to the way companies run their internship programs and will ensure that contributions get incorporated into GNOME throughout the summer.

The GNOME Foundation would like to be able to provide stipends to several students similar to the ones offered in the Google Summer of Code and we need to raise funds for this purpose. I’d like to ask you to consider contributing towards this program or to make a comment that you’d like your contribution to be used towards this program when contributing through Friends of GNOME. We are also seeking corporate sponsorship for the program, so please let us know if your company would like to participate.

GNOME Outreach Program for Women will allow more women to learn how exciting and approachable the free software is and to gain the necessary qualifications to work in the free software industry, contribute to and create free software projects. I am personally very excited about having this program in GNOME because the knowledge and experiences that I have gained by working in the free software community have greatly enriched my life and I believe it is important that more women have such similar opportunities.