women’s summer outreach program
Over the past few weeks, Chris Ball and I have been working with the GNOME Foundation on a program to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. We’ve just launched today and we’re really excited—check out the press release and the website!
More specifically, the GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. The money originates from GNOME’s participation in the Google “Summer of Code” program, for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google’s program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google’s contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME.
If you’re interested and eligible, visit the program website and fill out the application form! If you don’t want to apply (or aren’t eligible) but would like to help out, the best way to do this is to tell others about the program and/or put up our poster, designed by the ever-awesome Mairin Duffy.
C’mon people, spread the word and let’s make this program ROCK!
Update: There are articles up on NewsForge, LWN, Slashdot, and LinuxFR.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Can you ask the GNOME people to maybe draw up a button or something similar to Firefox buttons, that we can put on our websites ? The posters are great for college, but not for websites. :)
June 15th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
A women’s outreach program is an excellent idea. It’s nice to see people actively trying to increase the diversity within the GNOME development community. I’ll be sure to pass the links along to people I know.
June 15th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Very cool, but somewhat disappointed that involvement is being promoted as a chance to develop “Linux” desktop applications, when GNOME is very much a cross-kernel environment. (On the other hand, the Linux-only mentality does keep some folks here in a job fixing non-portable code to work on Solaris et al., so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much!)
June 20th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Hi Hannah, Thanks for adding me to your friends list
June 24th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
It’s amazing how much organizations try to get women into technology. They make excuses like women don’t get as many opportunities as men, blah, blah, blah. Give me a break. Anyone who has attended public school knows that’s not true. Women just aren’t interested in doing tech stuff. But that doesn’t make them inferior. But the real question is, what will women make that will amaze us? Would it be anything like what men have originated, which, with no guess work or exaggeration, is 100 per cent of the open source community.
But God save the U.S. if the women are forced into technology companies just because of affirmative action.