[ mail followup to: -women, please continue discussion there ] TL;DR: we've been invited to participate into GNOME Outreach Program for Women and I'd like to accept the invitation. To maximize impact, though, we need mentors and topics to complement the current GSoC tasks.
---- GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is a great internship initiative, by GNOME, initially for GNOME internship only, but which has recently been extended to other FOSS projects. If you don't know about it but are interested in this conversation, please have a look at [1], and in particular at [2]. [1]: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen [2]: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen#For_Organizations_and_Companies A couple of days before my trip at LibrePlanet, I've been contacted by Karen Sandler (Cc:-ed, in case I mess up something :-)) for inviting Debian to participate in the program. To that end we need (a) some money (entry level is ~5,500 USD for 1 internship), (b) internship topics, and (c) mentors. As one of my last act as DPL I'll be more than happy to approve using Debian money for 1 OPW internship, hoping it will prove successful and that we can expand our participation even further in next years. So we "just" lack b/c :-) At LibrePlanet, I've discussed the matter further with Karen and it turns out that, first, we have a bit more time for the internship topics than the strict timeline suggests: application deadline for interns is May 1st, it'll be enough to have topics/mentors around April 10th. Also, it is quite comment, and welcome, to have some overlap with GSoC that will be ongoing during the same period. We can for instance include GSoC tasks in the pool of OPW internship topics. Of course we should better not accept two students (1 OPW and 1 GSoC) for the same tasks. But we can propose to worthy GSoC candidates to do the internship as OPW _instead_, or we can let them do their GSoC and "label" their participation as OPW internship. However, note that an important aspect of OPW is that there is no "code" restriction. So while I think we should *also* propose GSoC tasks as part of it, it would be way more interesting to add non-coding tasks to them, therefore offering a wider range of choices to OPW candidates. But for that, we do need topics and mentors. Could be anything useful to Debian, from coding to artwork, from communication to accounting, from management to packaging, anything that would provide a GSoC-like, but broader in scope, internship experience. And, the most important part, would help in increasing women participation in Debian, something on which we've been working for a very long time. (FWIW, GNOME's experiences on the usefulness of OPW are quite impressive, see LibrePlanet 2013 talk by Marina Zhurakhinskaya.) I don't feel like piggybacking this extra work, rather last minute, onto the shoulders of the GSoC admins. Ideally, this is something that should be coordinated by someone on -women, in coordination with GSoC admins for dealing with the cases at the crossing of the two initiatives. Anyone up to it? Even if you're not, but you do have internship topics and mentors to propose, please mention it. It might be good enough to have just a few topics in addition to the GSoC tasks, as long as we have mentors for all of them. In that case I might help with the remaining coordination part myself (but not with mentoring, sorry, I'm already taken for GSoC this year). Thanks for your help, Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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