Hi Folks! Wanted to introduce myself to the mailing list and say hello.
I am a engagement team member for the GNOME desktop project. I usually work on outreach to prospect users, developers and companies. We are of course, very interested in getting students involved. Most of you might know that the OPW project (Outreach Program for Women) now known as Outreachy was started by the GNOME Project several years back. We have through that program successfully reached out to many female, and those who identify as female to work on various parts of GNOME. We are interested in university outreach as a goal. I currently have two talks scheduled at Purdue University my alma mater to talk with the freshman at the School of Science about Open Source as part of their 'Outside the Classroom' Program. We have another member who is also planning on doing university talks. In my professional life, I work as an open source advocate for Intel Corporation. My work centers on educating business units on implementing the open source model successfully - by not only writing good code, but to learn to work with the open source community as well to adhering to the GPL as an open source denizen amongst other things. Part of that works involves creating a pool of next generation programmers who understand the open source model. So I'm working many sides of this issue. :-) As we move forward the future is going to demand more familiarity with the open source community model. By creating opportunities for students to work on an open source project we help not only companies who are working on open source projects, but FOSS projects as well. I will close that we are working on re-vamping GNOME's entire outreach around volunteer capture, and looking at new approaches for students to be involved. The challenges are interesting, mature code bases like GNOME require and demand that a person understands the rudiments of working in a team environment as well as basic software engineering. The early days of GNOME had volunteers as young as 9 years old - who were able to grab the code and commit whatever they wanted. Now more discipline and commitment is required in order for your changes to be merged. My life involves evolving two different environments that in the end should work like a producer/consumer model. :-) So, hello! I'm looking forward to participate with everyone on university outreach. Thanks! sri
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