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 round 4 of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships that will take place from May 21 through August 20, 2012. Here is the page with the resources for helping us spread the word for that round.

The Software Freedom Conservancy joined GNOME Outreach Program for Women this round with an additional internship opportunity with the Twisted project. The internship rules are the same for both GNOME and Twisted projects, and you are welcome to apply for both with separate application forms if you are interested in both. The administrators for both projects will coordinate the selection process to ensure that we accept the top applicants for one of the projects.

For information about the participants from previous rounds and their accomplishments, please see

Schedule

February 23: program announced and application form made available on this page

February 23 - April 6: participants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it

April 6: application deadline

April 23: we announce accepted participants

May 21 - August 20: internships period

Accepted Participants

Outreach Program for Women

Congratulations on the end of the internships! The accomplishments of this round's participants fully described here!

Thanks to the generous sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation, Google, Mozilla, Collabora, the Free Software Foundation, and Red Hat we were able to accept 10 participants! The accepted participants, as well as their IRC nick, location, project, and mentor(s) are:

We have 1 additional intern through a partnership with the Twisted project and the Software Freedom Conservancy:

Fei Tan (argonemyth), Mauritius - Twisted Mail - Jessica McKellar

Google Summer of Code

Women who are students applying to work on the coding projects were encouraged to apply for Google Summer of Code as well. The administrators of both programs then coordinated to accept the top applicants for one of the programs.

The participants who applied for both Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code, and were accepted for the latter, or participated in the Outreach Program for Women in the past and were only eligible to apply for Google Summer of Code, as well as their location, project, and mentor are:

Matilda Bernard (RedAdmiral), New Delhi, India - GCompris - Bruno Coudoin

Meg Ford (m_22), Chicago, Illinois, USA - GNOME Documents - Cosimo Cecchi

Emily Gonyer (gonyere), Carrollton, Ohio, USA - GNOME Clock - Seif Lotfy

Jovanka Gulicoska (gulic), Skopje, Republic of Macedonia - Boxes - Zeeshan Ali Khattak

Beth Hadley (bhadley), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA - GCompris - Bruno Coudoin

Ashwini Oruganti (ashfall), Manipal, India - Twisted endpoints support - JP Calderone

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.

GNOME Love is the main initiative in GNOME that provides information and support for anyone wanting to become a GNOME contributor. You will find a lot of useful information for starting to contribute to GNOME on its pages.

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 various GNOME projects and get in touch with mentors 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 several internships for women from May through August, 2012. Any woman interested in working on GNOME who has not previously participated in a GNOME internship 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.

Because the program is intended to help newcomers and contributors who are relatively new to the GNOME community to get more involved, we unfortunately can't accept past participants of the Outreach Program for Women internships or those who participated in Google Summer of Code with the GNOME project. However, if past participants are eligible to apply for Google Summer of Code, they are more than welcome to do so to work on the GNOME project.

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 May 24 to participants who have begun their internships, $2250 on July 16 to participants in good standing with their mentors, and $2250 on August 27 to participants who have successfully completed their internships.

Is Google Summer of Code right for you?

This round of Outreach Program for Women internships is run in parallel with the Google Summer of Code program to encourage more women to apply to both. If you are a student applying for a coding project, you most likely are eligible to apply for the Google Summer of Code program, and should consider applying to work on the same project through both Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. The mentor you get in touch with to begin contributing should be able to mentor you for either program. The program administrators will coordinate the selection process to ensure that we accept the top applicants through one of the programs.

GNOME has a (non-exclusive) list of Google Summer of Code project ideas, that you can review. You should also review the information for students applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME. You should start out by preparing your Google Summer of Code application, and then put the same information about the project you are applying to work on in the Outreach Program for Women application when answering corresponding questions.

You might even want to look at all the other cool free software organizations that participate in Google Summer of Code! You can find mentors in some of them by following links from this page that lists mentors in different organizations. The best way to prepare to apply for Google Summer of Code is to start contributing early to an organization that interests you.

Unlike Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women in GNOME is open to non-students and non-coders, so you should just apply for the Outreach Program for Women internship if you are either not a student or not a coder.

Application Process

If you have any questions at any point during the application process, you are welcome to email them to women-outreach@gnome.org or ask them on the #gnome-women IRC channel on irc.gnome.org . It's easy to connect to IRC, and you can learn all about the use of IRC in GNOME and the different applications you can use to connect.

Four Outreach Program for Women interns from previous rounds - Liansu, Christy, Meg, and Tamara - created this cartoon for you to better explain the application process!

Choose a Project

Take a look at the list of various GNOME projects and mentors for them. Also, take a look at the GNOME project ideas for Google Summer of Code. You can apply to work on one of these ideas for the Outreach Program for Women too. Also, learn about the special internship opportunity with the Twisted project.

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

In the past, program participants have worked on Accessibility, Anjuta, Cheese, Empathy, GCompris, Getting Things GNOME!, GNOME Games, GNOME Shell, Pitivi, Art, Web Development, Documentation, Marketing, and Translation projects. These projects are happy to work with the program participants again, but some other projects that are looking forward to working with the program participants are Boxes, Gedit, GNOME Documents, GUPnP, Vino, Vinagre, and WAI-ARIA Automated Testing.

Feel free to let us know if you would like to work on a project that is not listed on the projects page and we will try to find a possible mentor for that project.

Make a Small Contribution

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, web development, marketing and translation 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.

Send in an Application

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. All applications must be received by 11:59pm GMT on April 6, 2012.

Please don't send in the application form until you have completed the initial contribution, unless it's less than a week to the application deadline and you are already working on your contribution. Once you have completed the initial contribution, send in your application right away, so that we have more time to follow up with you in case we need additional information. Please feel free to work on more contributions after that as your time allows. If you need to update your application, just send in an updated version to women-outreach@gnome.org with the same subject line.

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? Are you planning to apply for Google Summer of Code (once its application period opens on March 26)? 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 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 May 21 and August 20?

For Mentors

Please read the information for mentors and add your project and yourself as a mentor to the GNOME mentors list. By listing yourself there, you are providing GNOME newcomers with a friendly contact for your project not just in the context of an internship program, but for anytime throughout the year! Please e-mail women-outreach@gnome.org if you have any questions about participating in the program as a mentor and to ask to be added to that mailing list, which is private to the program's organizers and mentors.

For Companies

GNOME Outreach Program for Women attracts many motivated and talented applicants. All of our interns have had their work included in GNOME releases, with some of them completing major features during their internships. Of the 22 interns who've completed the program in the past, 14 continue contributing to the GNOME project and 5 of them became mentors. Sponsoring the program helps us bring new contributors to the project and helps them develop the skills necessary for working on free software projects in the industry.

Collabora, Google, Mozilla, and Red Hat have generously sponsored internships in the previous rounds. We'd love to have more internships sponsored by companies, as our pool of applicants becomes larger and more competitive with each round. Please let Karen Sandler or Marina Zhurakhinskaya know if your are interested in providing sponsorship for the program.

Optionally, you can let us know the details of a particular project you would like an intern to work on, as well as who would be a suitable mentor for that project, and we will encourage our applicants to explore it. All the work would need to be done upstream in GNOME.

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.