Dave Neary: Marina, you've co-ordinated the GNOME Outreach Program for Women for the past two years. Can you tell us how you got involved in GNOME yourself?

Marina: I joined Red Hat six years ago to work on a social networking product after seeing a posting from the team's manager on LinkedIn. I had used Linux through my college years and at my previous job, but I didn't have any experience contributing to free software. In fact, I remember puzzling over why there was a choice between two options - GNOME and KDE - at the login screen of my Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation at my previous job, and wondering how was I supposed to know which one to pick.

Four years ago my original team was merged into the desktop team and I started working on GNOME. With many great GNOME contributors out there, it's uncommon for the desktop team to hire someone who is not an established contributor, so the fact that I ended up working on GNOME is a happy coincidence.

Dave Neary: Do you think we're doing a good job as mentors in the GNOME community? What could we be doing better?

Marina: We have a lot of resources for someone who wants to start contributing to GNOME and people are generally happy to help, but we need to have more people taking an active role in informally mentoring newcomers. It'd be great if there were more people hanging out on #gnome-love and answering questions there.

It'd also be great if people suggested a suitable first bug to fix to newcomers and mentored them through the process of getting the patch committed. We should not be afraid to direct newcomers in what bug to fix first, as this will actually help them get started and learn things that will inform their subsequent contributions. Every Detail Matters is a great initiative to point out bugs that are important to fix to contributors with any level of experience.

Recently, we used the list of mentors we already had for the Outreach Program for Women to start a more general list of GNOME mentors who are willing to informally mentor any newcomer any time throughout the year. Everyone is encouraged to add themselves & their project(s) to the list!

GNOME Mentors List: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove/Mentors

Dave Neary: What do you think are the main issues that we need to work on as a community to see more women get involved in GNOME?

Marina: We need to spread the word more about the mentorship and internship opportunities we have for women. Out of the 12 participants we have this round, 3 received this information because I contacted people or groups in the area. One of these women and 6 others were encouraged to apply by someone locally. One woman was regularly reading Planet GNOME and 2 others were already involved in the GNOME community. If more people use the resources we provide for spreading the word at their university and local technical community for the next round, we would reach more women! The request to do so and the resources will be out sometime in February.

Beyond that, it would be great to organize events at universities and local technical communities that teach people the basics of how to contribute to free software, such as using a bug tracker, revision control system, and IRC. It's important to start with basics in order to attract a wider audience. The Open Source Workshop (http://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Workshop) at MIT organized by OpenHatch is one example of an event that many students found useful. It has excellent materials and interactive exercises available online. Also, it would be great to organize events where people can get help installing GNOME and starting to contribute to it. Being able to try things in a supportive environment where experienced contributors can help resolve any setback within minutes would help many people make the first step, which is the hardest. Emphasizing the collaborative style and mentioning the Outreach Program for Women in advertising such events would help attract women to attend them.

Dave Neary: Do you think that there's a need for a mentorship and outreach team? You mentioned that you want to get people informally mentoring, labeling some bugs "easy-fix" and committing to helping people fix them.

Marina: Formalizing the mentorship and outreach team is a good idea and we have already created outreach-list@gnome.org to steer the effort. At the same time, everyone in GNOME should consider informally mentoring newcomers, marking bugs that they can help a newcomer fix with the "gnome-love" keyword, signing up for the gnome-love@gnome.org mailing list, and hanging out in the #gnome-love IRC channel.

I also think we need to continue the effort to get women involved in the project for as long as we see that women who have a potential to be strong contributors are not getting involved in the same way as men who have this potential. Even though the number of women who are contributing to GNOME is rapidly growing with the help of the program, there are many women who have this potential who we have not reached yet. So what's common for us, might not yet be perceived the same way by people outside the project or free software community.

Dave Neary: Why do you think that there are women with the potential to contribute who aren't?

Marina: So I believe the main issue has been that they were not sure where to start. The program provided just the right encouragement and support in getting started.

Dave Neary: Do you have any tips for other projects which might like to do something similar? Perhaps some pit-falls they might need to avoid?

Marina: Yes, enabling interns to attend conferences and hackfests is very important. Meeting other people who are committed to GNOME and becoming friends with them motivates the new contributors to stay involved. Besides meeting face to face, there are also many problems which are easiest to resolve with two faces in front of one screen.