Outreach

GNOME had 24 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students and 4 Outreachy interns in 2015. The GNOME Foundation hosted its ninth round of the Outreach Program internships from December 2014 to March 2015 and transitioned the program to Software Freedom Conservancy under a new name, Outreachy, for the May to August 2015 round. The GNOME Foundation is proud to have launched the program and remains a core partner of Outreachy by providing infrastructure support. GNOME also continues offering Outreachy internships. In 2015, the GNOME Foundation and the Free Software Foundation provided dedicated sponsorship for GNOME Outreachy interns and Akamai, Cisco, Google, and HP provided general sponsorship for Outreachy, some of which was used to fund GNOME interns.

We celebrate past GSoC and Outreachy participants who became mentors for the programs. In 2015, we had five such people - Sebastian Dröge, Izidor Matušov, Tobias Mueller, Lasse Schuirmann, and Carlos Soriano. Additionally, Lasse Schuirmann joined the ranks of GSoC administrators for GNOME.

We continued making an emphasis on engaging our interns with the community by having a collaborative application process in which applicants were required to work on relevant contributions with mentors. We encouraged and helped interns attend GUADEC, and also required them to blog and aggregated their blog posts on Planet GNOME. With the help from the GNOME Foundation, Google, and GUADEC sponsors, 16 GSoC students attended GUADEC 2015. We made sure they felt welcome and integrated by having an interns' lunch at the conference and hosting a lightning talks plenary session in which they presented their work.

Carlos Soriano and Bastian Ilsø, both past GSoC participants, significantly revamped our initiative for newcomers, GNOME Love, and renamed it to Newcomers. The new Newcomers guide contains a curated list of newcomer-friendly projects, step-by-step instructions for setting up a development environment, explanation of Git usage in the context of GNOME contributions, and general advice and communications etiquette. The guide has an attractive design thanks to Bastian's design skills.

The December 2014 to March 2015 round of the Outreach Program had 44 participants with the following 16 Free and Open Source Software organizations:

• Debian
• Evergreen
• FFmpeg
• Foreman
• GNOME
• Linux kernel
• Mesos
• Mozilla
• Open Source Robotics Foundation

• OpenStack

• Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

• oVirt
• Perl
• Wikimedia
• X.Org
• Xen Project.

These internships were generously sponsored by:

• Equalizer Level - Red Hat and Wikimedia Foundation
• Promoter Level - Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Mozilla

• Includer Level - Akamai, Cisco, Codethink, Debian, Evergreen, FFmpeg, Free Software Foundation, Mapzen, Open Source Robotics Foundation, OpenStack Foundation, Perl, Rackspace, Samsung, Twitter, X.Org, and Xen Project.

References

• GSoC Statistics

• December 2014 - March 2015 Outreach Program GNOME participants

• December 2014 - March 2015 Outreach Program GNOME page with sponsors

• May - August 2015 Outreachy GNOME participants

• May - August 2015 Outreachy GNOME page with sponsors

• Press release about Outreachy transitioning to Conservancy

• Interns Lightning Talks Order

• Another Summer of Code at GNOME by Lasse Schuirmann

• Newcomers guide

Images

Comments

• Enumaration of organizations and sponsors at the end is a bit difficult to read. Perhaps we could use a list formatting to improve that - Alexandre Franke
• Through the newcomer initiative we found a designer volunteer (Bastian Ilso), and having a designer in the trenches made a significant difference. Not sure how important looks to other people or for the annual report, but internally it was the biggest difference. Maybe add something along the lines "we achieved to have a designer volunteer (name?), and that made a 180° turn on the overall experience" - Carlos Soriano
• Why does Openstack have an "!" in front of it when this article is in edit mode? - Nuritzi - RESOLVED (it makes it so that the word isn't hyperlinked)
• Reviewed the changes, fixing a couple typos. Incorporated Carlos's feedback about Bastian's awesome design contributions, crediting both Carlos and Bastian with the revamping of the initiative for newcomers. - Marina

• Added capitalization back in Git, since that's how upstream uses it in writing. -Marina

Reviewer(s) notes

Made changes to incorporate Alexandre's suggestion - Adelia

Reviewed by Nuritzi on May 31, 2016