Today, the GNOME project announced eight participants of the Outreach Program for Women internships! The internships will take place between December 15, 2010 and March 15, 2011. In the next few weeks, we’ll add the participants’ blogs to Planet GNOME, so that they can introduce themselves as well as write weekly updates about their work. Say “hi” to them on their blogs or when you see them on IRC. Also, if you are at the Boston Summit this weekend, say “hi” to Tiffany and Eugenia who will be attending it too.
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.