1. For Participants

1.1. About GNOME

GNOME is an innovative free software desktop that is distributed with many operating systems. It is design-driven and easy to use. 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 news.

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, Endless, Google, Igalia, SUSE, and Red Hat.

Newcomers is the main initiative in GNOME that provides information and support for anyone wanting to become a GNOME contributor. You should go through it's Newcomers Guide to get hands-on experience with how to contribute to GNOME. It has a recently-updated list of newcomer-friendly coding projects and mentors for them and an older list of mentors, which includes mentors for non-coding projects too. You can get in touch with these mentors any time throughout the year for informal help getting started.

1.2. Contact Information

If you have GNOME-specific questions at any point during the application process, you can write a topic on our Discourse instance, or ask them on the #newcomers or #gnome-hackers chat channels . Visit our Getting In Touch page to learn how you can connect to our community communication channels. The information about project-specific channels and mentors' nicks and e-mails is available in the newcomer-friendly coding projects and all projects with mentors lists.

1.3. Choose a Project

If you are interested in applying for Outreachy, you first need to complete Outreachy's initial application by the deadline. If it's approved, you will be able to see full information about the projects and how to contact the mentors when contribution period begins. Before then, you can only preview the information about the project ideas for this round. Outreachy application process is structured in this way so that all applicants have the same amount of time to contribute to projects during the contribution period.

When the contribution period begins, contact mentors with any questions, and, once you decide which project you are most interested in working on, make the required small contribution to it with the help of a mentor. Continue contributing to the project and following up on all feedback you get throughout the application period and beyond to demonstrate that you have skills and ability to learn needed to work on the project. Make sure you complete your Final Outreachy application in time.

If you are student interested in coding projects, please also consider applying for GNOME through Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Please visit GNOME's documentation for GSoC and follow the directions on the pages about GSoC to apply.

Please note that the time commitment and payment amount is different for Outreachy and GSoC. Outreachy has 6,000 USD stipend regardless of where the intern is located. GSoC has 1,500 USD to 3,300 USD stipend depending on the Purchasing Power Parity value of the country where the participant is located. If you apply for both programs with GNOME, you will first be considered for Outreachy, since we will know you are able to make a larger time commitment. Please feel free to make a note in your applications about which program you prefer.

The following things can help you decide what project to choose:

Read the project's wiki page on the GNOME wiki
Lurk on the project's chat channels
Especially if you are applying for a software development internship, build the code for the project and run it to check out its latest capabilities (the wiki usually has the instructions for doing this, but don't hesitate twice to ask the project's mentor or people on IRC for help if you encounter any problems)
Look at the open issues for the project in the GNOME's GitLab
Look at the recent changes in the project's Git repository
Read the recent discussion on the project's corresponding category/tag on GNOME Discourse instance
Read the blogs of the project's mentor and other project contributors (you can learn who they are when looking at the Git repository)
Introduce yourself to the project's mentor and discuss what your tasks during the internship program would be

2. For Mentors

Here is how you can be involved:

Learn Read GNOME's information for mentors and Outreachy's information for mentors and mentor FAQ. These pages provide important information about the expectations and best practices for mentors.
Mentor an intern Add your idea for a project you can mentor an intern working on on the Outreachy site for approval by the GNOME coordinator by the deadline that Outreachy has for adding project ideas. Because we only usually have a few participants in Outreachy with GNOME, we are limiting the available projects to the ones that are most strategic for GNOME. These include, but are not limited to, projects in the area of privacy, GTK, core experience, core applications, developer experience, and development infrastructure. The cross-team triage committee for proposed project ideas consists of Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, and Sriram Ramkrishna.
Mentor any time Add your project and yourself as a mentor to the newcomer-friendly coding projects or an all projects mentors lists. By listing yourself there, you are providing GNOME newcomers with a friendly contact for your project any time throughout the year!
Ask a coordinator Kristi Progri, and Felipe Borges are the coordinators for the program in GNOME.

3. For Organizations and Companies

Please see the information for organizations and companies on the main Outreachy page. We would love to have more organizations join the program and more companies sponsor internships with GNOME and other organizations.

Please feel free to contact Kristi Progri, and Felipe Borges with any questions.

4. Previous Rounds

You can find the information about the previous rounds, including accepted participants and projects offered on the following pages:

Rounds 16 to 20 (May 2018 to December 2020 rounds)
Round 15 (December 2017 - March 2018)
Round 14 (May - August 2017)
Round 13 (December 2016 - March 2017)
Round 12 (May - August 2016)
Round 11 (December 2015 - March 2016)
Round 10 (May - August 2015)
Round 9 (December 2014 - March 2015)
Round 8 (May - August 2014)
Round 7 ((December 2013 - March 2014)
Round 6 (June - September 2013)
Round 5 (January - April 2013)
Round 4 (May - August 2012)
Round 3 (December 2011 - March 2012)
Round 2 (May - August 2011)
Round 1 (December 2010 - March 2011)

5. 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. All participants in the program must agree to the terms and conditions of the program which will be provided to the selected applicants and mentors.