The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is an internship program that aims to increase participation of women in free and open source software projects by matching interns with mentorship opportunities in organizations like Fedora, GNOME, Mozilla, and others; interns will work remotely while collaborating with mentors and project teams through communication methods like IRC, email, and bug trackers. The goal of OPW is to welcome more women into the inclusive FOSS community and guide early contributions.

1. Outreach Program for Women
-Priyanka Nag
(OPW Intern)

2. A little about FOSS
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is
software that gives the user the freedom to use,
copy, study, change, and improve it.
- benefits society
- creates a fun collaborative community around
a project
- allows anyone to make innovative changes
that reach many people.

3. Organizations involved in OPW are:
• Deltacloud - abstraction layer for the differences between the cloud
providers
• Fedora - GNU/Linux-based operating system
• GNOME - GNU/Linux-based desktop environment and applications
• JBoss - Java-based application server and related projects
• Mozilla - software that promotes the goals of the Open Web
• Open Technology Institute - democratized network infrastructure for
universal access
• OpenITP - support for developers who build circumvention technology
• OpenStack - cloud deployment and management software
• Subversion - full-featured version control system
• Tor - anonymizing proxy network
• Wikimedia - wiki software and infrastructure for Wikipedia and
related projects

4. How we work?
• Participants will work remotely from home,
while getting guidance from an assigned
mentor and collaborating within their
project’s team and the rest of the FOSS
community.

5. What work do we do?
The projects include:
• software development
• system administration
• web development
• user experience design
• graphic design
• Documentation
• marketing

6. Why OPW?
• Outreach Program for Women (OPW)
internships were inspired in many ways
by Google Summer of Code and by how few
women applied for it in the past.
• The GNOME Foundation first started the
internships program with one round in 2006,
and then resumed the effort in 2010 with 4
more rounds organized every half a year.

7. How OPW helps?
• By having a program targeted specifically towards women,
it was found that talented and passionate participants
could be reached, who were uncertain about how to start
otherwise.
• Hopefully this effort will help many women learn how
exciting, varied and valuable work on FOSS projects can be
and how inclusive the community really is.
• This program is a welcoming link that will connect us with
people working on individual projects in various FOSS
organizations and guide one through their first
contribution.

8. How we keep in touch?
• IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is one of the primary
means of communication within FOSS projects
• One is also be expected to communicate
electronically with other project members via
other means, including bug tracker comments,
mailing list discussion, blog posts, and
personal e-mail

9. Application Process
• Choose a project
• Make a small contribution
• Send in an Application

10. Thank you
Any queries?
Please visit:
https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
to learn more.