The Gnome Outreach Program for Women is an internship program modeled on Google Summer of Code and administered by the Gnome project on a regular basis that awards stipends to participants who successfully complete a requested free and open-source software project contribution under the guidance of project mentors. This program is intended to increase the participation of women in free software projects and increase the diversity of project contributor pools.

The current round has an application deadline on March 19, 2014 and internship dates are from May 19 to August 18. These are great opportunities especially for women – it’s a paid internship you can do from home, according to your schedule, with a mentor to help you through the confusing bits, and giving you a wide network of colleagues who can help you get future jobs. Any woman who has not previously participated in an Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code internship is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period.

The internships offered are not limited to coding, but include user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a FOSS project.

For all other information about the program, including the application process and the application form, please see the main program page.

You can also take a look at the many other internship and full-time opportunities available with the organizations and companies supporting Outreach Program for Women. You are welcome to start working with mentors from the participating organizations in your spare time any time throughout the year to make your first contributions and gain experience with the relevant technologies and community practices.

What is FOSS?

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that gives the user the freedom to use, copy, study, change, and improve it. There are many Free and Open Source Software licenses under which software can be released with these freedoms.

Many people work on FOSS as a hobby in their spare time and some are employed by companies and non-profit organizations, including ones that are sponsoring this program! Bloomberg, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Mozilla, Rackspace, and Red Hat have been some of the corporate sponsors of the program. GNOME Foundation, Linux Foundation, Open Source Robotics Foundation, Open Technology Institute, OpenStack Foundation, The Tor Project, and Wikimedia Foundation have been some of the non-profit organizations sponsoring this program.