Contents
This page contains all the information about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships that took place December 15, 2010 through March 15, 2011 and coincided with the Southern Hemisphere summer. Here is the page with the resources for helping us spread the word for that round.
1. Schedule
- July 12 - September 7: individual mentors and companies add their projects; participants can start getting in touch with mentors, learning about and contributing to projects
- September 7: application form made available on this page
- September 7 - October 25: participants needed to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it
- October 25: application deadline
- November 5: we announced accepted participants
- December 15 - March 15: internships period
2. Accepted Participants
Congratulations on the end of the internships! The accomplishments of this round's participants are described in this GNOME Project press release, and the participants of the new round are announced!
The accepted participants were announced in the GNOME project press release and you can see more information about them in a blog post here. The accepted participants, as well as their IRC nick, location, project, and mentor are:
Tiffany Antopolski (mimico), Toronto, Canada - Documentation - Paul Cutler
Nanci de Brito Bonfim (nanci), Salvador, Brazil - Anjuta - Sébastien Granjoux
Luciana Fujii Pontello (fujii), Belo Horizonte, Brazil - Cheese - Thiago Sousa Santos
Eugenia Gabrielova (genia), Chicago, USA - Anjuta - Johannes Schmid
Laura Elisa Lucas Alday (stringlau), Buenos Aires, Argentina - Cheese - Daniel Siegel
Hellyna Ng (hellyna), Johor, Malaysia / Singapore - GNOME Shell - Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Natalia Andrea Ruz Leiva (nruz), Valparaíso, Chile - Documentation - Paul Cutler
Chandni Verma (glassrose), Lucknow, India - Empathy - Danielle Madeley
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.
3. For Participants
3.1. 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 apply to work on GNOME through it. 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.
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. If the December through March internship dates don't work for you, please check back in March for the June through August internships or apply to work on GNOME through the Google Summer of Code.
3.2. Program Details
The GNOME Foundation, with the help from Google and Collabora, will be sponsoring at least six internships for women from December 15, 2010 through March 15, 2011. These internships are primarily aimed at female college students from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a school break during this time. However, 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 weekly about their work and their blog posts will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.
The GNOME Foundation will provide each participant with a $4,500 (USD) stipend. $500 will be wired on December 17 to participants who have begun their internships, $2000 on February 2 to participants in good standing with their mentors, and $2000 on March 22 to participants who have successfully completed their internships.
3.3. 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 October 25, 2010. 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 .
3.4. 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? 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 December 15 and March 15?
4. 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.
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.
mentor: Jason Clinton
Here is a guide about contributing to GNOME Games.
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.
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.
mentor: Paul Cutler
- Help with re-write of the GNOME User Guide and / or Accessibility Guide for GNOME 3.0; re-write any GNOME application(s) help to be topic based and written in Mallard.
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.
mentor: daniel g. siegel Also willing to mentor other GNOME-related ideas, just contact me.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
5. 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 in the Google Summer of Code. Rather, we'd like the accepted participants to work as part of the team, starting with smaller tasks and proressing 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
Please use the following template: