GNOME mentoring program for women continues

Source: live.gnome.org

As part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, the Foundation has announced the twelve women who will be sponsored and mentored to work on open source projects. The internships will run from 12 December 2011 to 12 March 2012. The programme builds on previous successful internships which have seen participants work on on-screen keyboards for the GNOME Shell, Empathy avatars, educational Braille software and many other applications.

The aim of the program is to improve the resources available for newcomers who are getting involved in GNOME and to reach out to more women and encourage them to contribute. The outreach program also offers newcomers mentoring and provides information on how to start their own projects and pursue careers in the free software/open source industry and community.

The mentoring program covers many disciplines, from programming and graphic design to documentation and marketing. Successful applicants will be encouraged to work together with the project’s mentor and the other project contributors during their internship.

“Open Source technology is shaping our future and must reflect all people. It’s critical to involve more women in its development,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of Mozilla. All of the successful participants come from a background of using GNOME, and many are avid Free Software users and contributors. Of the twelve applicants, four are being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, four by Google, two by Mozilla, one by Collabora and one by Red Hat.

(lcz)