Outreach programs/status

Last update on: 2012-12-18

2012-11-20
Sumana Harihareswara posted a retrospective on our participation in Summer of Code 2012, concluding that we're improving at student retention but need to get better at producing something useful at the end of a mentorship period, and offering suggestions on how to improve our processes in the future. Applications are now open for Wikimedia's Outreach Program for Women, which offers paid internships for work in open source software projects and is organized by GNOME. This follows the community's decision not to participate in Google Code-In due to a lack of mentors.

2012-11-monthly
The first phase of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) has been completed, receiving the submissions of more than 15 firm candidates, delivered to 8 mentors available. The Wikimedia Foundation is funding 4 full-time internship positions between January and March 2013. There is a possibility to obtain more, depending on external sponsors of the program. The selected candidates will be announced on December 11. The OPW is organized by the GNOME Foundation and 11 FLOSS projects are taking part.

2012-12-11
Five MediaWiki candidates have been selected for the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and they will be announced today. They will work on different projects as full time interns under the supervision of MediaWiki mentors between January and March 2013. We got 10 submissions from about 25 people interested. The OPW is organized by the GNOME Foundation and 11 FLOSS projects are taking part. The rather open and participatory selection process we have defined for OPW will be used as basis for future mentoring programs.

2012-12-18
We announced the 6 interns selected for the Outreach Program for Women. 4 of them are funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and 2 by Google through an agreement with the GNOME Foundation, organizers of the program. Our payment to the GNOME Foundation has been approved and will be transferred in few days. Some casual planning discussions have started already.