This page contains information specific to GNOME's participation in Outreachy internships from May 25 to August 25, 2015.

One intern did her internships with GNOME during this round. The internship was generously sponsored by the GNOME Foundation.

Project Ideas

Applicants, GNOME's page for the program explains how you can choose a project. Please see the confirmed ideas below.

Mentors, first it's very important that your read GNOME's information for mentors and Outreachy's information for mentors. Both provide important information about expectations and best practices.

Add your project ideas and a link to your contact information here. 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, developer experience, GTK+, core experience, core applications, and web infrastructure. We would also like people to think ahead of time how they will be able to provide excellent mentorship to the interns before, during, and after the internship, and whether there is a larger project team the intern will be able to receive support from.

The cross-team triage committee for proposed project ideas consists of Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, and Sriram Ramkrishna.

Please add your idea to the Unconfirmed Ideas section below using the following format: 

 . '''Idea title''' (mentor: MentorName linking to you live.gnome.org personal info page)
 * ''Benefits'': describe the benefits of your idea
 * ''Importance'': why is this idea strategic for GNOME?
 * ''Requirements'': what should the applicant know already?
 * ''Mentorship style'': why would you make an excellent mentor?
 * ''Project team'': what is the project team like?
 * Note: one or multiple notes, links, whatever further information
----

As explained in the section on redirecting on the Outreachy information for mentors page, please feel free to add [No longer taking applicants] next to your project idea if you have as many applicants as you can work with during the application process or have a strong applicant you will likely want to accept.

Confirmed Ideas

  • Improve Spanish translations and create a guideline (mentor: https://wiki.gnome.org/DanielMustieles)

  • Benefits: complete Spanish translations and have a guideline to unify some criteria for translations (glossary, commont terms, etc)

  • Importance: Spanish team is the most active translation team and places the basis for other latin american teams, which can reuse Spanish translations to start or improve their own teams

  • Requirements: have a perfect knowledge of Spanish grammar and a technical background is a must to be a translator. English knowledge is, of course, neccesary.

  • Mentorship style: I'm a very active member in the team and will follow closely the applicant to help her in whatever she needs during the internship. Also, I've been working in this team for a long time, so I have a perfect knowledge of its internal working.

  • [No longer taking applicants] Implement additional event sources for GNOME Shell's Time & Date drop-down (mentor: Florian Müllner)

  • Benefits: GNOME 3.16 brings an updated notification system which involves a more functional Time & Date Drop-Down. However not all sources from the designs have been implemented: it would be awesome to also have weather forecasts and birthday reminders readily available there. If time permits, it would be great to work with the GNOME design team on integrating Music controls, as the special notification type we used to have was removed by the redesign.

  • Requirements: knowledge of JavaScript, DBus, ideally some GObject basics and possibly C.

  • [No longer taking applicants] Usability testing (mentor: Jim Hall)

  • Benefits: By conducting usability tests of GNOME, you can help find areas in GNOME that can be improved, to make GNOME even easier for people to use.

  • Importance: GNOME needs to be an easy and elegant way to use your computer. With good usability, GNOME will be easy for everyone to use.

  • Requirements: Usability testing is not difficult, and anyone can do it, even if you have never done usability testing before. Conducting your own usability test will require you to meet with people, to ask questions. You can re-use the usability test scenarios we used in previous usability tests, or you can write your own (for example, to cover new functionality or programs not previously covered). You will need access to at least two computers: a desktop or laptop for testers to use, and another (preferably a laptop) for you to take notes on. Usability testing is best done in a quiet space away from other distractions; for example, you might use a classroom or meeting room.

  • Mentorship style: You'll be working independently, with lots of feedback from me! We'll do online chat to help you learn about usability testing, and to get started with your own usability test. As you get ready for your usability test, I can help you to prepare materials and questions, and offer coaching on what to expect. Afterwards, I can help you to analyze the test results using a "heat map" method.

  • Project team: Most communication occurs via email and via blogs. I am also happy to meet with you via online chat (video, voice, or text).

  • [No longer taking applicants] GNOME a11y improvements (mentor: RuiMatos)

  • Benefits: GNOME should become even better for users with a11y requirements.

  • Importance: we're one of the best free desktops for users that require a11y features but we still lag proprietary OSs. Our on-screen keyboard requires some a11y features (hover to press and scanning modes) and our zoom and color filters configuration UI needs to be updated.

  • Requirements: knowing C, at least some GTK+ idioms and some Javascript.

  • Mentorship style: I'll answer any questions and help guide the development as needed.

  • Project team: communication mostly happens through irc.gnome.org and bugzilla.gnome.org.

  • Note: this project will require working across several GNOME modules: gnome-control-center, gnome-shell and gnome-initial-setup

Unconfirmed Ideas

Rejected Ideas

  • Improve newcomers documentation for contributing in GNOME (mentor: Carlos Soriano)

  • Benefits: We have been lacking good documentation for contributing for Gnome for some time. We had the wiki but given the openness and unofficial of the wiki we had multiple tutorials distributed over the wiki, doing the same, and pointing in different ways.

  • Plan: Move/Write/Redesign/Remove most of GnomeLove wiki to developer.gnome.org.

  • Requirements: Loving teaching, and better English than me (this one is easy =P). Gnome platform knowledge is a plus.

  • Note: Desktop-devel-list discussion. in which there was not enough agreement on this idea.

Outreach/Outreachy/2015/MayAugust (last edited 2015-10-05 23:24:36 by MarinaZ)