OPW – GNOME Foundation

39 Interns Will Work to Improve GNOME this Summer

The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce that 39 participants have been accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program For Women (OPW) internships to work with the GNOME Project this summer.

The work will cover a wide range of tasks including improving Shell animations, annotation support in Evince, DLNA capabilities in Photos, and documentation updates. Information about all accepted participants and their projects is available in the e-mail welcoming the interns, which was sent to the Foundation mailing list.

It will be easy to follow the progress of the interns, as they are required to blog on Planet GNOME every two weeks.

These opportunities would not have been possible without the GNOME community members, many of whom themselves have participated in these programs before, guiding the participants and the financial sponsorship from Google, HP , Linux Foundation, and Red Hat.

The Foundation is looking forward to the results of the interns’ work, which will provide a better experience for users and developers.

Time to apply for OPW and GSoC

With the summer coming closer, the GNOME Foundation are excited to announce applications are open for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women.

Outreach Program for Women

Outreach Program for Women offers a $5500 stipend for a four months internship working with a Free/Open Source organization. The program accepts proposals not only for coding projects, but also for documentation, design, and marketing projects. Every organization has mentors to guide and work with accepted participants during the course of the internship and application process.

As part of the application process, applicants must contribute to the project they indents to work on during the internship.

“Participating in the GNOME community as an intern allowed me to gain an understanding of the technologies used for development and the structure of free/open source teams. These skills have helped to enrich my understanding of FOSS and computer science”
-Meg Ford former Outreach Program for Women intern

The GNOME community encourages anyone interested to visit the Outreach Program for Women website, and to check our wiki where project ideas are listed. The application deadline for this round of the program is March 19.

Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an internship program sponsored by Google. Just like the Outreach Program for Women, GSoC offers a $5500 scholarship for students to work on Free/Open Source projects along with a mentor from the community.

2014 marks the 10th year of the program, and the GNOME project has participated every year. The program presents a great opportunity for students to get involved with our community, and to use their developments skill to contribute to the project. Many project ideas are available, and as usual students are also welcome to discuss their own ideas with prospective mentors!

Applications for this year’s round of GSoC are open until March 21.

Join Us

We are looking forward to welcome this year’s interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women!

If you’re interest in applying to work with GNOME, get in touch with us! The sooner you start your application, the better your chances to be accepted for both programs.

GNOME publishes the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2013

Over the last years, the GNOME Outreach Program made several improvements to its central projects, the Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code. Some of these improvements are making sure each intern connects with a potential mentor ahead of time, contributes a patch to the relevant module as part of the application process, and has blog posts with progress updates incorporated on Planet GNOME. All of these requirements were made to help students and interns to connect to their projects early on.

This year, we continued the tradition of a yearbook with the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2013. In this book, you will find all participants from the Outreach Program for Women January-April 2013, the Outreach Program for Women June-September 2013 and Summer of Code 2013 . Furthermore, all students and interns who will be at this years GUADEC are highlighted with a badge. Please take the time to get to know our newest contributors!

Download the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2013

25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women

25 women have been accepted to participate in the GNOME-led Outreach Program for Women for January 2 to April 2 remote internships with Deltacloud, Fedora, GNOME, JBoss, Mozilla, Open Technology Institute, OpenITP, OpenStack, Subversion, and Wikimedia. The internships are generously sponsored by the participating organizations, as well as Red Hat, Google, Rackspace, and Elego.

GNOME, which until the Summer of 2012 ran the program without other organizations, is benefiting from the program in measurable ways. 17% of GUADEC 2012 attendees were women (41 woman), compared to only 4% (6 women) among attendees affiliated with GNOME three years earlier at the Desktop Summit 2009. In a recent survey of Free Software newcomers to 12 organizations, 50% of GNOME respondents were women whereas only 6% of the respondents from other organizations were women (with 15% being the next highest concentration). Moreover, GNOME had 22 female respondents, which was a greater number than the 20 female respondents from all of the other organizations combined.

Interns from the most recent completed round of the Outreach Program for Women added to the long list of accomplishments of the 47 women who took part in the program since December 2010.

The dramatic increase in participation of women in GNOME and our experience with the Outreach Program for Women show that there are many women interested in contributing to Free Software and that reaching out to them with targeted opportunities is an effective way to help them get involved. We anticipate the expansion of the program will create a big shift in the demographic of Free Software contributors.

The collaborative application process, during which the applicants are asked to work on a small contribution to the project they are applying to work on with the help from the mentors, has been a cornerstone of the program since its first round. All accepted participants successfully completed the required contribution and showed that they have both passion and skills to work on their chosen projects. Coordinators and mentors from all participating organizations have done a tremendous job in helping scale the program and welcoming all applicants into their communities.

Red Hat is sponsoring seven internships – three for Fedora and one each for Deltacloud, GNOME, JBoss, and OpenStack. “GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women has already been effective at increasing participation of women in Free Software, and it’s exciting to see it expand to more communities that Red Hat contributes to,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Red Hat is proud to provide sponsorship, coordination and engineering mentors for this transformative effort.”

The Wikimedia Foundation was a popular organization this round. For its applicants, it defined an open and participatory application process, in which applicants added their information to a common wiki page and members of the community provided endorsements and feedback on the wiki pages for individual applicants. “We’re delighted to participate in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The whole point of Wikipedia is that everyone can contribute, and for it to reach its full potential requires participation from everybody, including women. The GNOME outreach program has proven to be a practical solution for engaging women — one that really works.”

Google continues to be a dedicated sponsor of the program, providing general funds for internships beyond the ones individual organizations were able to sponsor. “It is incredibly exciting to watch GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women expand so quickly and so well,” said Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google. “This new involvement by other projects and organizations is a tribute to the skill and dedication of the GNOME team that created the program, particularly Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Karen Sandler, who organize it.”

The participants are asked to blog about their work at least once every two weeks during the internships. Their blogs are linked to on the program page and are aggregated on the Women in Free Software planet, in addition to being aggregated on the planets of their respective organizations.

The GNOME Foundation invites Free Software organizations and companies that support Free Software to join the next round which will take place from June to August, and have an application deadline in April. Please let Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Karen Sandler know if your organization is interested or if you have any questions by the end of February.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. In the 15 years since then, the project has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, GNOME is a popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized by a large number of popular mobile device manufacturers.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. It is comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation supports the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. Find out more about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation through their websites: www.gnome.org / foundation.gnome.org
Become a Friend of GNOME today! Visit this link: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

Media Enquiries

Karen Sandler
GNOME Foundation Executive Director
email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
phone: +1-617-206-3947

GNOME and its Partners Announce Internships for Women

The GNOME Foundation, along with seven other free software organizations, is pleased to announce Free and Open Source Software internships for women. In an effort to get more women involved in FOSS, the coalition is offering stipends of $5,000 for work on software development, system administration, web development, user experience design, graphic design, documentation, and marketing. The organizations include:

* Deltacloud – abstraction layer for the differences between the cloud providers
* Fedora – GNU/Linux-based operating system
* GNOME – GNU/Linux-based desktop environment and applications
* JBoss – Java-based application server and related projects
* Mozilla – software that promotes the goals of the Open Web
* OpenStack – cloud deployment and management software
* Tor – anonymizing proxy network
* Wikimedia – wiki software and infrastructure for Wikipedia and related projects

Participants will work remotely from home, while getting guidance from an assigned mentor and collaborating within their project’s team and the rest of the FOSS community. Any woman available for a full time internship who has not previously participated in the Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code is welcome to apply. College women from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a school summer break during most of this time are particularly encouraged to apply.

GNOME has found the program to be extremely effective in the past. For example, attendance at GNOME’s annual conference, GUADEC, has improved from 4% (6 women) to 17% (41 woman) in just three years. During the last round of the program, the Software Freedom Conservancy joined GNOME and sponsored its own participant for the Twisted Project, we’re pleased that the seven organizations listed above have chosen to join this next round.

Please visit https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen to learn more and apply. This program is organized by the GNOME Foundation. Please help us spread the word by forwarding this message to interested university and community groups.

The mentorship opportunities are also available throughout the year for anyone interested in getting started contributing to FOSS outside of the internship program.

Congratulations to our summer interns!

This summer, the GNOME project has had the great pleasure of having a total of 39 interns working with us. This included 29 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) interns as well as 10 participants in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (GOPW).

The internships officially ended yesterday, and we’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank everyone who participated in them. We have seen some fantastic work done over the summer, including awesome new features as well as documentation and artwork. It has been a joy to work alongside such enthusiastic and talented individuals. You can find out more about our interns from this summer, as well as from last winter’s GOPW internships, in the 2012 GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook.

We hope that all our interns have enjoyed participating in the GNOME project, and that they have learned from their experiences. They have all truly become members of the GNOME community, and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

This summer has been one of the most successful ever for GNOME’s outreach efforts. The project continues to invest in our outreach programs, which are an important part of our mission to spread software freedom.

Once again: congratulations to all.

GNOME publishes the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012

In the last year, the GNOME Outreach Program made several improvements to its central projects, the Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code. Some of these improvements are making sure each intern connects with a potential mentor ahead of time, contributes a patch to the relevant module as part of the application process, and has blog posts with progress updates incorporated on Planet GNOME. All of these requirements were made to help students and interns to connect to their projects early on.

These efforts are extended today with the publication of the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012. In this book, you will find all participants from the Outreach Program for Women 2011/2012, Outreach Program for Women 2012 and Google Summer of Code 2012. Furthermore, all students and interns who will be at this years GUADEC are highlighted with a badge. Please take the time to get to know our newest contributors!

Download the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012

GNOME Launches New Round of Outreach Program for Women Internships and Improves Other Outreach Initiatives

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce its latest round of the Outreach Program for Women Internships, for which it has been able to accept ten outstanding applicants. GNOME’s efforts are made possible by the strong sponsorship that the program has received from free software companies and organizations committed to increasing the involvement of women in technology. Google and Mozilla have each sponsored two participants, Collabora, the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat have each sponsored one participant, and the GNOME Foundation has sponsored the remaining three from its general funds. The Software Freedom Conservancy adds an eleventh intern to the Outreach Program for Women. In addition, among 29 participants, GNOME accepted five women for Google Summer of Code, who all got involved through the outreach program.

John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation which joins this year as a new sponsor, commented, “The Free Software Foundation is proud to sponsor an internship in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women. The free software movement is about freedom for everyone, but we have a long way to go to make that a reality. This program’s past achievements in expanding the community by welcoming and retaining newcomers have moved us closer to that goal, and we can’t wait to hear this summer’s success stories.”

This is also the Conservancy’s first participation in the program. It is sponsoring its own participant for the Twisted Project. Twisted maintainer and mentor Jessica McKellar said, “Programs like this encourage free and open source communities to reflect on how to be more welcoming and supportive of people of all backgrounds. The success of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women has been tremendously inspiring; I am pleased that Twisted is joining it in tackling stereotypes in open source head-on this summer while working with our new contributors on some exciting projects.”

Previous rounds of the program have been very successful, and have helped in other mentorship and outreach efforts of the project. When GNOME started the current Outreach Program for Women two years ago, it had an initial list of nine mentors from eight projects who were eager to help with the program. Connecting newcomers with mentors who can guide them in their initial contributions proved to be the most important aspect of the outreach effort. For that reason, GNOME recently moved the list of mentors that was built up for the Outreach Program for Women to be a part of the GNOME Love initiative. There are now 37 mentors from 22 projects who any newcomer can contact any time throughout the year in this ever-growing list. The GNOME team also started a page on the Google Summer of Code wiki that contains links to such lists of mentors in many free software organizations. That page currently has 15 organizations. In addition to being a general resource to point students looking for an organization to join to, the list is also used to spread the word about Google Summer of Code and mentorship opportunities among technical women groups at many universities.

The Outreach Program for Women demonstrated that an initial contribution to the project by an applicant increases their involvement with the project, prepares them for the work during the internship period, and serves as an important selection criteria. This year, GNOME also required the students applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on, not just to supply a link to a bug they fixed in any free software project. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor.

The GNOME community is very proud of the accomplishments of the last round’s Outreach Program for Women participants, which include the following:

Kasia Bondarava committed Belarusian translations for 35 GNOME modules. With her help, Belarusian translation coverage went from 67% to 88%, making Belarusian a new officially supported language. She also made a comprehensive comparison of different translator tools and advocated for better translator comments.
Christy Eller has tremendously improved the web development process in GNOME and created the new Friends of GNOME pages.
Susanna Huhtanen created comprehensive developer documentation about writing GNOME applications in JavaScript.
Patricia Santana Cruz added support for sharing videos and images with different online services, improved hotplug connection of camera devices, and added recorded time when making a video in the Cheese webcam application.
Sophia Yu ported Swell Foop game from JavaScript to Vala, completely reworking its implementation, and updated several other games to use new GNOME APIs.

The detailed accomplishments of all 11 program participants can be found at https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011/Accomplishments

Over three quarters of the women involved in the program have stayed connected to the GNOME community. Better still, Outreach Program for Women participants have a strong tradition of becoming mentors in GNOME. Luciana Fujii Pontello and Ekaterina Gerasimova mentored Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women participants in previous rounds. Tiffany Antopolski, Anita Reitere and Srishti Sethi mentored Google Code-In participants. This round, Christy Eller will co-mentor a Web Development intern and Tiffany Antopolski will mentor four Documentation interns, three of whom will be working on Developer Documentation along with Tiffany. Many former participants have also presented at free software conferences and local events to raise awareness about GNOME and their work. Many have helped with the outreach program by spreading the word about it, improving the materials available about the program, and guiding new applicants.

The Outreach Program for Women is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with help and support from Karen Sandler, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors. The essential work is done by the program’s mentors in helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects. For more information about the Outreach Program for Women, visit http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women

GNOME was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation works to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.

Software Freedom Conservancy Joins GNOME Outreach Program

The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to welcome the Software Freedom Conservancy to its 2012 Outreach Program for Women. The Outreach Program for Women seeks to engage women in the development, documentation and general improvement of open source and free software. Concurrently with the Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women additionally funds internships for women to spend the summer participating in and contributing to free software projects while being mentored by an experienced member of the free software community.

The deadline for applications to both the Outreach Program for Women internships and Google’s Summer of Code is April 6th. GNOME has made available a list of Google Summer of Code project ideas that are suitable for either this outreach program or Summer of Code. Conservancy’s internship is with the Twisted project, which has also made available full details and application requirements on the internship on its wiki. The Conservancy’s internship will follow the internship rules outlined by the GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for
Women.

Conservancy and the GNOME Foundation urge women who aspire to get involved with free software projects this summer to act fast! The deadline for applications for all these programs is just days away!