Outreachy/Round 6



Wikimedia is participating in the Free and Open Source Outreach Program for Women 2013. Several paid internship positions for 3 months projects are available for women willing to develop open source projects related to Wikimedia or other participant organizations.

Below you have more details specific to the Wikimedia projects and mentors. You can find general information about the program (like deadlines!) in the official site.

About Wikimedia
Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Through various projects, chapters, and the support structure of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

If you are a technical woman then we probably have an activity interesting for you. All our software projects are open and free. You probably know Wikipedia, and there is more. MediaWiki is a powerful wiki engine used by Wikimedia websites and hundreds of projects out there. We also run projects related with server infrastructure, automated testing, mobile, internationalization, user experience... The main programming languages used are PHP, Javascript and HTML/CSS.

Get in touch
If you're interested in participating you can reach to us with questions and suggestions. We are happy to help finding a good project for you!
 * Join the wikitech-l technical mailing list.
 * Drop in on our #mediawiki chat channel.
 * If you prefer, you can contact directly qgil AT wikimedia DOT org (qgil on IRC).

Candidates
Here we track the status of all candidates. You are encouraged to fill in your data as soon as possible, regardless of the status of your applications. We love transparency and we are used to work-in-progress.


 * Place all the relevant information and links about you in your user page.
 * Your microtask must be linked to a bug report.
 * Your project must be linked to a wiki page with all the details.
 * Also, add a section "Support for Outreach Program for Women" in your Talk page. You can ask people to post there their recommendations about the project and yourself.

Microtasks
As part of your application, you'll be making a small contribution to our project. This might be fixing one of our annoying little bugs, writing a summary of a few days on the developers' mailing list, checking whether a bug reported in the bugtracker is reproducible, or something like that. In order to get a task, you'll need to contact one of the mentors and ask for one.

Possible projects

 * Moved to the Discussion page.

Selection


These are the steps we are following for selecting our candidates:


 * 2012-12-03 - Deadline for receiving applications. Candidates still can finish their microtasks, polish their proposals and user pages. They can also reach out to the community and colleagues to get endorsements and support.
 * 2012-12-07 - First mentors meeting (private). Agreement on best candidates. Agreement on open questions and further actions in case of multiple candidates for one internship position.
 * 2012-12-10 - Second mentors meeting (private), if needed. Agreement on selected candidates.
 * 2012-12-11 - All accepted participants will be announced by the OPW admins.

Criteria
Mentors and community members are encouraged to help candidates improving their proposals based on these criteria. They help us evaluating a candidate and a proposal as a whole. We are not trying to build any scorecard to be measured with a calculator.

ESSENTIAL
 * Is your project proposal publicly available in a wiki page, containing answers for these questions?
 * Can you commit to the amount of time estimated by the program?
 * Are there two mentors (or at least one) committed to support you through the program?
 * Are the related project maintainers aware of your proposal, and are they willing to integrate the deliverables?
 * What skills and experience do you have to complete the project? URLs welcome.

RELEVANT
 * Why are you interested in joining this program?
 * Is your plan realistic, leaving time for tasks like community feedback, testing, documentation...?
 * Is there an emergency plan to be applied if the project is not completed by the end of the program?

VERY GOOD TO KNOW
 * Who else wants to help and see this proposal succeed? Do you have a section in your Talk page with endorsements?
 * Have you contributed to Wikimedia projects in any way before?

Process
The selection process starts right after the deadline for submissions. Most of the time is dedicated to gather community feedback about the proposals and polish the last details.


 * Each candidate must create a support section in their Talk user page: "Outreach Program for Women endorsements".
 * Community members and colleagues are encouraged to leave endorsements and feedback in that section. Don't forget to sign your comments!
 * Mentors might request additional information after the submission deadline.

Candidates are selected by consensus taking the selection criteria as main reference.

Mentors
Signed-up mentors
 * 1) Andre Klapper for bug report triaging
 * 2) MarkTraceur (talk) (via personal communication)
 * 3) Dereckson
 * 4) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk)
 * 5) Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
 * 6) Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 13 November 2012 (UTC) I have too many candidates already and cannot respond to any more. Sorry. Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 14:31, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
 * 7) Jorm (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
 * 8) heather walls (talk) 23:18, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
 * 9) MAssaf (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * 10) Pginer (talk) 22:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Org admin
 * 1) Quim Gil

Motivation
This initiative is suitable for the Wikimedia community because:


 * We'll make strong connections with a few talented people who will stick around
 * We can encourage people to work on testing, design, documentation, marketing, and other areas as well as code
 * It's a proven method for increasing the number and proportion of women in an open source community
 * Interns don't need to be students, so we're more accepting of age diversity
 * Instead of making newbies write fixed proposals with schedules, internships can follow broader charters and flex to accommodate students' interests and abilities