Outreachy

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Outreachy Logo

The Software Freedom Conservancy's Outreachy program is a full-time internship program for under-represented groups of any age and background to spend 3 months contributing to a free and open source software project. The program is the successor to GNOME's Outreach Program for Women. It was renamed in 2015 and expanded to engage people from a range of underrepresented groups.

The program's GNOME wiki page has details about previous, current, and upcoming rounds.

Wikimedia and Mozilla OPW interns, mentors and alums, 2014

Program coordinator Marina Zhurakhinskaya with Fedora alums Marie Nordin and Karen Tang and Yocto Project alum Anne Mulhern at Flock 2014

History

Initial round (2006)

The GNOME Foundation first started the internships program with one round in 2006. It was inspired by the lack of diversity of participants in Google's Summer of Code that year. In its initial form, the OPW only recruited women to work on the GNOME project.

GNOME OPW (2010-2014)

The GNOME Foundation then resumed the effort in 2010 with rounds organized every half a year. In the May-August 2012 round, the Software Freedom Conservancy joined the Outreach Program for Women with one internship with the Twisted project. In the January-April 2013 round, many other FOSS organizations joined the program, and new rounds continue to have many non-GNOME projects offering internships.

The program won the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) annual Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2014. According to the FSF, the program's "critical work" "benefits society more broadly, addressing gender discrimination by empowering women to develop leadership and development skills in a society which runs on technology."

Women who have been leaders in the OPW include:

• Karen Sandler
• Marina Zhurakhinskaya
• Sarah Sharp

Outreachy (2015--)

In 2015 the Software Freedom Conservancy took over OPW and rebranded it as "Outreachy", with the goal of expanding to engage people from various underrepresented groups.

In 2015, the program is run parallel to Google Summer of Code and participants are encouraged to apply for both.

The next round of Outreachy internships will have an application deadline on March 24, 2015, and internship dates from May 25 to August 25. Coding, design, documentation and other projects will be available. Applicants will be asked to select a project with one of the participating organizations and collaborate with a mentor listed for that project to make a relevant contribution to the project during the application process. Accepted participants will work remotely, while being guided by their mentor, and will receive a $5,500 stipend.

Populations served by Outreachy

The OPW originally aimed to help women get involved in open source; in recent years, this has been expanded to include a wider range of marginalised/underrepresented communities. The Outreachy website in 2015 says:

The upcoming round of internships is open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender. We are planning to expand the program to more participants from underrepresented backgrounds in the future.

Outcomes and success stories

Linux Kernel OPW Interns and Coordinator, 2014

• Open source interns outperform industry heavyweights in Linux Kernel contributions (Intel open source blog). "Of the 200 companies that contributed to kernel release 3.11, the OPW interns contributed the eleventh highest amount, ahead of companies such as Google, Oracle, ARM, and Cisco."
• 2014 kernel internship report by Sarah Sharp. "It’s interesting to note that a few of the OPW alumni have stepped into open source leadership positions, either by reviewing contributions, maintaining a project, or by managing a team of open source contributors. Another exciting result of OPW is that some of the kernel OPW alumni are getting paid to work as Linux Kernel developers."
• GNOME gains a usability specialist (Linux Weekly News)

Controversy and incidents

During its OPW years, Outreachy was sometimes the subject of controversy for various reasons:

• Some open source community members objected to the program on the grounds that it constitutes Reverse sexism, such as in the special support for women thread on the Linux Australia list.
• Within the GNOME community, there was some concern that OPW was causing a disproportionate amount of work for the GNOME Foundation while not being part of its central mission. In April 2014, the GNOME Foundation had a temporary cash-flow crisis due to the administrative overhead associated with OPW.
• OPW participation in the Linux Kernel project was closely tied to the Linux kernel civility discussion, eg. Sarah Sharp posted about the need to create a separate safe space: "We created a separate Google group for the interns, since there was no way I was going to have them ask questions on LKML."

References

• Official website
• Former OPW website
• The program's GNOME wiki page
• Wikipedia article