The page with the information about the latest internship opportunities is here. This is a page about an earlier round of internships.

This page contains all the information about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships that took place May 23 through August 22, 2011 and coincided with the Nothern Hemisphere summer and Google Summer of Code program dates. Here is the page with the resources for helping us spread the word for that round.

Schedule

• March 16: program announced and application form made available on this page
• March 16 - April 8: participants needed to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it
• April 8: application deadline
• April 25: we announced accepted participants
• May 23 - August 22: internships period

Accepted Participants

Congratulations on the end of the internships! The accomplishments of this round's participants are highlighted in the GNOME Project press release, which also announces the new round's participants, and fully described here!

The accepted participants, as well as the accomplishments of the participants of the previous round, were announced in this GNOME project press release.

Outreach Program for Women

The accepted participants, as well as their IRC nick, location, project, and mentor(s) are:

• Aline Duarte Bessa (alibezz), Salvador, Brazil - Documentation, Accessibility - David Bolter and Joanmarie Diggs

• Meg Ford (m_22), Chicago, USA - Art, Accessibility - David Bolter and Andreas Nilsson

• Ekaterina Gerasimova (kittykat), Berlin, Germany - Documentation - Shaun McCance

• Julita Inca (yulys), Lima, Peru - Documentation - Phil Bull

• Priscilla Mahlangu (priny), Pretoria, South Africa - Localization - Friedel Wolff

• Anita Reitere (nitalynx), Riga, Latvia - Documentation - Phil Bull

• Kelly Sinnott (polymathica), Las Vegas, USA - Documentation - Shaun McCance

• Liansu Yu (yuliansu), Beijing, China - Art - Andreas Nilsson

Google Summer of Code

The participants who applied for both Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code and were accepted for the latter, as well as their location, project, and mentor are:

• Tiffany Antopolski (mimico), Toronto, Canada - Empathy - Danielle Madeley

• Tamara Atanasoska (tamara), Skopje, Republic of Macedonia - Anjuta - Johannes Schmid

• Neha Doijode (sanjien), Karnataka, India - GNOME Shell - Marina Zhurakhinskaya

• Nohemi Fernandez (fernandex), Chicago, USA - GNOME Shell - Dan Winship

• Raluca Elena Podiuc (mimi), Bucharest, Romania - Cheese - Luciana Fujii Pontello

• Srishti Sethi (SrishAkaTux), Rajasthan, India - GCompris - Bruno Coudoin

• Madhumitha Viswanathan (madhuvishy), Chennai, India - GTG - Luca Invernizzi

Congratulations to our accepted participants! Thank you to everyone 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.

For Participants

Background Information

GNOME is an innovative desktop using free software, is easy to use, and is the most popular desktop distributed with free operating systems. GNOME has an exciting and motivated community of people working on projects they feel passionate about and a wide community of users. You can learn more about the latest going-ons in GNOME by reading Planet GNOME blog aggregator and GNOME Journal.

People involved with GNOME do various things for the project: software development, system administration, user interface design, graphic design, documentation, community management, marketing, identifying issues and reporting bugs, helping users, event organization, and translations. Many people work on the project as a hobby in their spare time and some are employed by companies, such as Canonical, Collabora, Google, IBM, Igalia, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat.

Google Summer of Code provides a great opportunity for students to work on free software projects, including GNOME, in the summer and receive a stipend for their work. The GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships are inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code and by how few women have applied to work on GNOME through it in the past. By having a program targeted specifically towards women, we are hoping to allow more of you to learn how exciting, varied and valuable work on GNOME can be and how inclusive the community really is. This program is a welcoming link that will connect you with people working on individual projects and guide you through your first contribution. We would like to also encourage more of you to apply to the Google Summer of Code program to work on GNOME!

Please feel free to learn more about the participating projects and get in touch with mentors for them anytime throughout the year if you are interested in contributing to GNOME outside of an internship program.

You can learn more about the participants of the last round of the Outreach Program for Women internships by reading this press release and by reading about the participants and following the links to their blogs in this blog post.

Program Details

The GNOME Foundation will be sponsoring at least three internships for women from May 23 through August 22, 2011. Any woman interested in working on GNOME is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period.

The internship is expected to be a full-time effort, meaning that the participants must be able to spend 40 hours a week on their project. Participants will work remotely from home. Because IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is one of the primary means of communication within free software projects, participants should be present on their project's IRC channel while working. They will also be expected to communicate electronically with other project members via other means, including Bugzilla comments, mailing list discussion, blog posts, and personal e-mail. Participants will be expected to blog at least once every two weeks about their work and their blog posts will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation will provide each participant with a $5,000 (USD) stipend. $500 will be wired on May 25 to participants who have begun their internships, $2250 on July 18 to participants in good standing with their mentors, and $2250 on August 29 to participants who have successfully completed their internships.

Is Google Summer of Code right for you?

This round of Outreach Program for Women internships is run in parallel with the Google Summer of Code program to encourage more women to apply to both. If you are a student applying for a coding project, you most likely are eligible to apply for the Google Summer of Code program, and should consider applying to work on the same project through both Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. The program administrators will coordinate the selection process to ensure that we accept the top applicants through one of the programs. You might even want to look at all the other cool free software projects that participate in Google Summer of Code!

Unlike Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women in GNOME is open to non-students and non-coders, so you should just apply for the Outreach Program for Women internship if you are either not a student or not a coder. Out of the eight participants we had in the last round, three were not students, and two others were working on the documentation project.

You can find out more about applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME here. You should not hesitate to ask a mentor from a project listed under the Outreach Program for Women participating projects to mentor you for the Google Summer of Code, or vice versa to ask a mentor whose idea is listed on the Google Summer of Code ideas page to mentor you for the Outreach Program for Women internship.

Application Process

Applications should be sent via email to women-outreach@gnome.org with a subject line of "[APPLICATION] Your Name". All applications must be received by 11:59pm GMT on April 8, 2011. We recommend sending your application as early as possible, so that we have more time to follow up with you in case we need additional information. If you need to update your application, just send in an updated version to women-outreach@gnome.org with the same subject line.

Here is the list of participating projects. The most important thing you need to do before submitting an application is to make a contribution to the project you want to work on. In the process of making a contribution, you should introduce yourself to the mentor for the project. Together with the mentor, you should figure out the possible details and a timeline for the work that will be completed during the internship. It's best to allocate time over several weeks for this process and to start as early as possible.

For software development projects, an appropriate contribution is to fix an existing bug. You can download and run the code for the project, look at the list of the open bugs, and choose one to fix. Your contribution may end up being just a few lines of code, but this demonstrates a willingness to learn and get involved. The best way to identify a good bug to fix is to ask the project mentor for suggestions. While fixing the bug, you should feel free to ask for help from the mentor or from other people on the project's IRC channel. Typically, once you submit a patch that fixes the bug, your patch will be reviewed and you will need to follow up on the reviewer's feedback until your patch is ready to be included in the project.

For graphic design, documentation, or marketing projects, you should ask the project mentor for contribution suggestions and then work with them while making your contribution.

While you'll only need to contribute to one project for your application, you will be able to list several you are interested in. This will ensure that even if two strong candidates applied for the same project, we can offer spots with different projects to both of them.

Feel free to let us know if you would like to work on a project that is not listed and we will try to find a possible mentor for that project.

If you have any questions about the application process, you can either email them to women-outreach@gnome.org or ask them on the #gnome-women IRC channel on irc.gnome.org .

Application Form

Please fill out the answers to the following questions and e-mail them to women-outreach@gnome.org with a subject line of "[APPLICATION] Your Name". You may optionally attach your resume or include any other information that is relevant to your application.

Name:

E-mail address:

IRC Nick:

Web Page / Blog / Microblog:

Location:

Education completed or in progress (i.e., university, major/concentration, degree level, and graduation year):

How did you hear about this program?

Are you applying for Google Summer of Code?

Please describe your experience with GNOME as a user and as a contributor (include the information about the contribution you made to the project you are interested in here):

Please describe your experience with any other free software projects as a user and as a contributor:

Please describe any relevant projects that you have worked on previously and what knowledge you gained from working on them:

What participating project(s) are you interested in?

Please describe the details and the timeline of the work you plan to accomplish on the project you are most interested in (discuss these first with the mentor of the project):

Will you have any other time commitments, such as school work, another job, planned vacation, etc., between May 23 and August 22?

Participating Projects

You can find the information about the projects on their wiki pages. The link next to the project name is the name of the project's IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel on irc.gnome.org . You can learn more about the use of IRC for GNOME development and how to install an IRC client here. You can find the contact information for the mentors on their individual pages.

Take a look at the additional GNOME project ideas on the Google Summer of Code ideas page. Feel free to get in touch with any mentors listed there to ask them to mentor you for the Women Outreach Program internship if their project looks interesting to you.

• Accessibility (#a11y)

  • mentors: Joanmarie Diggs, Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias

  • The GNOME Accessibility project develops solutions for making the free desktop accessible to people with various disabilities, such as visual impairments.

• Anjuta (#anjuta)

  • mentor: Johannes Schmid Also willing to mentor other GNOME-related ideas, just contact me.

  • Anjuta is a versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ and other languages. Possible roles are software development, usability, and documentation.

• Cheese (#cheese)

  • mentors: daniel g. siegel Also willing to mentor other GNOME-related ideas, just contact me, Luciana Fujii.

  • Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others. We are always interested in new, great ideas and an even tighter integration in GNOME

• Documentation (#docs)

  • mentor: Phil Bull

  • The GNOME documentation is undergoing a massive overhaul - things are changing fast, so now is a particularly exciting time to get involved! We're looking for someone to work on some of the following tasks: writing, editing and testing help topics for end users; writing guides for developers; integrating help into user interfaces; performing help usability tests; making high-quality instructional videos to be integrated into the help; and helping distros to use the GNOME docs as a basis for their own specific documentation. Your own ideas are welcome too! You'll probably be using Mallard XML and git version control along the way. There's a bit more information on the Documentation Project wiki page.

• Empathy (#empathy)

  • mentors: Danielle Madeley, Guillaume Desmottes

  • Empathy is a messaging program which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. We are interested in people working on software development, usability, documentation, and a new default theme.

• GCompris (#gcompris on irc.freenode.net)

  • mentor: Bruno Coudoin (bdoin)

  • GCompris is an educational software for children 2 to 10. It maintains its own list of ideas but other ideas will be evaluated as well.

• Gedit (#gedit)

  • mentor: Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (nacho)

  • gedit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. We need help to port our plugins to gobject-introspection and also you can find out some ideas in our Roadmap.

• Getting Things GNOME! (#gtg)

  • mentor: Luca Invernizzi

  • Getting Things GNOME! is an todo manager for the GNOME desktop environment (a' la Google Tasks or Remember The Milk). Download it and check it out (the package is called "gtg" in debian/ubuntu). Some project ideas are listed here, but we have lots of others in our bug tracker. We are a small team and we would be happy to have new contributors. Our wiki is here

• GNOME Art/Design (#gnome-design)

  • mentor: Andreas Nilsson

  • GNOME have lots of need for graphics design. Looking for students interested in website layouts, project logos or application graphics such as icons and similar.

• GNOME Games (#gnome-games)

  • mentor: Jason Clinton

  • Here is a guide about contributing to GNOME Games.

• GNOME Shell (#gnome-shell)

  • mentor: Marina Zhurakhinskaya

  • GNOME Shell is the new look of the GNOME desktop. We are interested in people working on software development, graphic and interactions design, and documentation. Here is a step-by-step guide for getting involved with the project.

• Marketing (#marketing)

  • mentor: Stormy Peters

  • Analyzing and improving web site metrics, developing and executing fundraising campaigns, developing presentation materials, working on GNOME 3.0 marketing campaign with the marketing team and partners.

• GNOME localisation for South African languages (#i18n or #zaf on FreeNode)

  • mentor: Friedel Wolff

  • Provide the GNOME user interface in South African languages. Join to learn how to do the most with a small translation team, to learn about translation, creating useful terminology, reviewing and submitting translations. Read about getting involved in localisation projects. It's fun!

For Mentors

By listing your project above, you are providing the participants with a friendly contact for your project not just for the internships program, but for anytime throughout the year! Here are a few things we'd like to ask:

• Please make sure that the page with your personal info contains your IRC nick and the channels you usually hang out on, in addition to your e-mail.

• Please create and link to some guide that has a step-by-step description of how to get started contributing to your project. (See such guide for GNOME Shell as an example.)

• Please provide the applicants with suitable introductory tasks once they get in touch with you.
• Please discuss with the applicants the details of the work they'll be doing during the internship period. This does not need to be a stand-alone task like it has been customary for Google Summer of Code. Rather, we'd like the accepted participants to work as part of the team, starting with smaller tasks and progressing to larger ones. This will help ensure that their contributions are incorporated into the project. So the applicants just need to know what areas of the project they are likely to work on.

For Companies

We'd love to have more internships sponsored by companies, in addition to the 3 spots being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Please add the projects you'd like to sponsor to the top of the list of participating projects, indicate that they would be sponsored by your company, and possibly add one of the employees as a mentor for the project. All the work would need to be done upstream in GNOME. We will encourage participants to explore company-sponsored projects first. E-mail us at women-outreach@gnome.org if you have any questions.

Disclaimer

This program and all offers related to it are void where prohibited or restricted by law or where operation of the program would violate any law or right. By applying to this program or participating in it, you agree that all claims related to this program will be adjudicated in and under the laws of the State of California in the United States of America.