The page with the information about the latest internship opportunities is here. This is a page about an earlier round of internships.

This page contains all the information about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships that are planned for December 12, 2011 through March 12, 2012 to coincide with the Southern Hemisphere summer. Here is the page with the resources for helping us spread the word for that round.

For information about the participants from previous rounds and their accomplishments, please see the participants list from 2010 and the participants list from the May though August round in 2011.

Schedule

September 16: program announced and application form made available on this page

September 16 - October 31: participants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it

October 31: application deadline

November 16: we announce accepted participants

December 12 - March 12: internships period

Accepted Participants

Congratulations on the end of the internships! The accomplishments of 11 participants who successfully completed the program are described here! Unfortunately, Laura Lazzati had to drop out for personal reasons after the first month of the program.

The accepted participants were announced in the GNOME project press release. The accepted participants, as well as their IRC nick, location, project, and mentor are:

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.

For Participants

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, 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 have applied to work on GNOME through it in the past. 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.

Program Details

The GNOME Foundation and several companies that support GNOME will be sponsoring about eight internships for women from December 12, 2011 through March 12, 2012. 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. This program is open to anyone who identifies herself as a woman.

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 at least once every two weeks about their work and their blog posts will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation will provide each participant with a $5,000 (USD) stipend. $500 will be sent on December 15 to participants who have begun their internships, $2250 on February 1 to participants in good standing with their mentors, and $2250 on March 19 to participants who have successfully completed their internships.

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 31, 2011. 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. First, you will need to decide which project or projects you are most interested in working on. The following things can help you with your decision:

Read the project's wiki page on the GNOME wiki

Lurk on the project's IRC channel

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 bugs for the project in the GNOME Bugzilla

Look at the recent changes in the project's Git repository

Read the recent discussion on the project's mailing list

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

Once you decide on the project you are most interested in, the most important thing you need to do before submitting an application is to make a small contribution to that project. You should ask the project's mentor for a suggestion for what a suitable contribution can be. If you have an idea about what you'd like to do for your first contribution, feel free to propose it. While working on your contribution, you should feel free to ask for help from the mentor or from other people in the project's IRC channel. It is typical that once you submit your contribution, your mentor or another person who reviews it will have some feedback about what you can improve in it. Please be sure to follow up on the reviewer's feedback until your contribution is ready to be included in the project. 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 will need to download and run the code for the project and create a patch that fixes some bug. Your patch may end up being just a few lines of code, but this demonstrates a willingness to learn and get involved. You will need to upload your patch to the corresponding bug in the project's Bugzilla and likely go through several iterations of the patch review, where you will get some comments about how you can improve the patch and will need to follow up with an updated patch. This kind of review process is standard for many of the changes that go in, so please don't be deterred by it.

For graphic design, documentation, or marketing projects, you should discuss your contribution with the project's mentor, e-mail it to them, and be sure to follow up on all the feedback.

While you'll only need to contribute to one project for your application, you can 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 .

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 12 and March 12?

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.

Featured

These projects and mentors have not yet had Outreach Program for Women interns working with them. Please explore them first if you are not sure what project you'd like to work on.

Mainstays

These projects and mentors already had Outreach Program for Women interns working with them. They'd be happy to have more interns working with them, so get in touch with them if they interest you the most.

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 all the information necessary for getting in touch with you and learning about your work, such as your e-mail address, your IRC nick and the channels you usually hang out on, and a link to your blog.

Please link to all the useful resources about how to start contributing to your project. Just linking to your project's wiki page is fine, but if you have a chance 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 it has been customary for Google Summer of Code. Rather, we'd like the accepted participants to work as part of the team, starting with smaller tasks and progressing 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 and a tentative timeline.

For Companies

We'd love to have more internships sponsored by companies, in addition to the three 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.

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.