Tag Archives: geeky students

Upcoming open source opportunities: Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women

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Right now, there are two big initiatives going on for those interested in getting involved in Free and Open Source Software:

banner-gsoc2013

Google Summer of Code (deadline: May 3)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Students work from home, paired up with at least one mentor who can guide them through the process of collaborating with their project’s community. There are a huge number of projects suggestions available, and many projects also accept new ideas from students if you think you’ve got an idea that would be great.

The stipend is $5,000 (USD) for approximately 40h/week of work from June 17 to September 23, so this is a pretty decent short-term job.

The deadline to apply is May 3rd, but if you’re interested it’s worth getting involved now because it takes time to find an organization you want to work with, meet the developers, and get help from them in producing a really terrific application.

There are 177 accepted mentoring organizations, but let me take a minute to plug the two I’m involved with:

  1. I’m the org admin for the Python Software Foundation this year. As well as sponsoring development on the Python programming language itself, we’re an umbrella organization for a large number of projects that use Python, including my own favourite open source project GNU Mailman, a variety of scientific tools, development toolkits, and more. The whole list is here. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the mentors in person at PyCon this year, and I’m really excited to be working with them, and I think you will be too!
  2. I’m also involved with Systers, which as you may know is an organization for technical women. As one might expect, working with Systers is a great opportunity to work with technical women on an open source project! More information can be found on their wiki.

I know lots of other folk here are involved with GSoC: please feel free to advertise your projects in the comments!

Outreach program for Women (deadline: May 1)

If you’re a woman who’s interested in getting involved in open source, you may also want to check out the Outreach Program for Women which is similar to GSoC but not limited to students:

Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships were inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it in the past. This was reflective of a generally low number of women participating in the FOSS development.
…
By having a program targeted specifically towards women, we found that we reached talented and passionate participants, who were uncertain about how to start otherwise. We hope this effort will help many women learn how exciting, varied and valuable work on FOSS projects 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 in various FOSS organizations and guide you through your first contribution.

Here’s the poster:
opw-poster-USLetter-2013-JuneSeptember

Not a student or a woman but want to get involved?

For those of you who are experienced open source contributors:

Many projects are still signing up mentors for GSoC. I usually tell people that this is a 0-10h/week volunteer job (although you do get a t-shirt!) where you get a chance to work with a protégé for the summer and show them the ropes. It can be very busy at times (especially right now when students are just starting and have lots of questions) but it’s very rewarding. Even if your project isn’t one of the ones participating this year, you can still help other projects by doing things like hanging out on IRC to help students set up their development environments.

For those of you not in open source but would like to be:

While these programs are only open to students and women, now is actually a pretty decent time to get involved with a new project because mentors are available to answer questions and students are asking lots of the questions so you don’t have to. Go join a mailing list or irc channel and see if you can follow along!

For everyone:

Please advertise these programs to students and women who might not otherwise see them! Put up posters where minorities not usually represented in open source will see them, help encourage people who might be too nervous to submit an application, and help connect these folk directly to projects whenever you can.

Got questions?

Feel free to ask in the comments below. I believe we have plenty of folk here involved with both programs who’d be happy to help you get involved!

Organic freerange sustainably harvested linkspam, 28 February 2010

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  • In multiple posts, Lucy Connor continues thinking about possible costs of diversity
  • N.K. Jemisin considers how she accidentally wrote a postfeminist protagonist in her new fantasy series
  • Maura McHugh, aka Splinster laments the SF industry’s failure to ask women’s opinions:

    In the article the magazine asked 34 directors, screenwriters and authors to name an obscure or under-rated cult horror that deserved better recognition. Yup, you guessed it, not a single woman was asked for her opinion.” What’s more, in a plot twist worthy of any novel of the genre, the SFX publication comes smack dab in the middle of Women in Horror Month, set up to raise awareness of and give recognition to the genre’s many female creators.

  • More event backchannel inappropriateness, this time in the PHP community.
  • There’s been some discussion about Silicon Valley diversity of late. See what Techcrunch and Mercury News had to say.
  • Maybe this article about meritocratic hiring could be insightful to startups wanting to avoid non-diverse hiring pools:

    Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. [...] And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

  • From the compare-and-contrast department: How the gamer stereotype stacks up against reality.
  • An unscientific survey of MIT students indicates that geeky students are a typical subset of society with typical sex lives as opposed to the stereotyped socially awkward folk. But we all knew that already, right?
  • Not all countries have the same gender disparity in Tech. Stanford Uni’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research examines gender roles regarding Technology based careers in Malaysia, where women reign supreme.
  • The Free Software Foundation is seeking donations to help sponsor more attendees for their Women’s Caucus at LibrePlanet 2010 next month.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.