Outreachy/Round 6

Wikimedia is participating in a FOSS outreach program to offer paid internships to women to work on our open source projects. Details here. This is suitable for our 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

Logistics

 * November 1 very soon: program announced and application form made available. Anyone who identifies as a woman can apply.
 * November 1 - November 28: applicants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it
 * November 28: application deadline
 * December 7: accepted participants announced
 * January 2 - April 2: internship period

People we need

 * One organizational administrator (Quim Gil), to be available nearly every day Nov 12-April 16. I would set up our wikipage, do the application paperwork, nag developers and community members to become mentors and provide tasks, and, while the contest is running, making sure that mentors respond quickly. (Preferably two so that we can back each other up during vacations.)
 * Approximately six mentors, each of whom would be available for at least five hours per week November 15-March 30th. Mentors would make and evaluate tasks and mentor students via email and IRC, preferably also via audio or video calls.  Sumana would like for each student to have a main mentor and a backup mentor.

Each of these people will need to agree to:
 * less than a 48 hour turnaround for review of each completed task submitted by a student
 * be consistently friendly and nurturing for every participant

Signup
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)

Org admin
 * 1) Quim Gil

For participants
More details are coming soon! But if you're interested in participating, the first steps are:
 * Join the wikitech-l technical mailing list and just listen for a while
 * Drop in on our 24/7 chat channel and just listen for a while
 * Sign up for a free MediaWiki.org account

Intro tasks
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 is reproducible, or something like that. More details coming soon!