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Looking for more internship project ideas for Outreachy (December-March cohort)

GNOME is interested in participating in the Outreachy December-March cohort, and while we already have a few great projects, we are looking for experienced mentors with a couple more project ideas. Hurry up, we have until September 11 to conclude our list of ideas.

Please, submit project ideas on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/internship/project-ideas

Feel free to message us on #internships:gnome.org (matrix) if you have any doubts.

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GNOME is participating in Outreachy! (May to August 2024)

The Outreachy organizers have approved GNOME to participate in the current round of Outreachy!

The GNOME Foundation is interested in sponsoring 3 internship projects for the May to August cohort.

@mentors If you are interested in mentoring, please discuss project ideas in our Project Ideas repository.

  • Feb. 23, 2024 is the deadline for mentors to submit new projects.

@interns Initial applications for the Outreachy May 2024 to Aug 2024 internships are due on Jan 29 at 4pm UTC: https://www.outreachy.org/apply/

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Updates on our internships administration

For the past few years I have been managing GNOME’s participation in the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internship programs. As a former alumni myself more than a decade ago, I believe these programs are a fundamental tool to onboard new contributors to our community and to provide opportunities for contributors to learn and join a thriving open source community. While I enjoy part of this management role, I am still a developer, and some of the internship activities are really energy/time consuming. So I have been looking for ways to improve that.

During my term as a Board member, the Board established the concept of committees, to extend the Board’s responsibilities and to solidify the Board’s position of governance and oversight. See https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Committees

Before my Board term ended, I proposed the creation of yet another committee: the Internship Committee. My goal was to increase the visibility of our internship efforts within the Board so that committee members have the resources and support they need to coordinate the programs. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/-/issues/239

Now the Board has voted to approve the creation of the committee! This means that now the Board will always have a liason member dedicated to facilitate the communication between the Board and the internship administrators. This also means that now the Internship Committee has more formal responsibilities, such as the ones defined on the committee charter. The committee already has multiple community members and is working towards improving our processeses.

Another step I wanted to take was to produce a documentation for the internship administration processeses so that we eliminate the bus factor and have also a easy time onboarding new admins.

I just pushed the initial version of the Internship Admin guide, containing also my personal collection of templates for communication with interns, mentors, program organizations, etc… This allows for community members to improve the processes themselves all in once place. A lot of the templates I wrote need update and rewording (contributions are welcome).

And, while we are at it, don’t forget that we are gathering ideas for GSoC and Outreachy internships for 2024. Visit https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/internship-project-ideas to learn more.