GNOME Foundation Board candidacy: Marina Zhurakhinskaya

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Name: Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Email: marinaz redhat com
Affiliation: Red Hat
Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/marina

Dear Foundation,

I have been working on GNOME for the last five years, as a developer of online-desktop and gnome-shell and as 
a lead of our outreach efforts. With the help of so many people in the community, three and a half years ago 
I created the Outreach Program for Women which enabled 49 women to do internships with GNOME and 
significantly increased participation of women in the community. This program has grown to include 
internships with 18 Free Software organizations this summer. I applied my experience in organizing outreach 
to women to improving our outreach and engagement with all new contributors. I made the mentors list we 
started for the program a general resource and introduced first patch and blogging requirements for our 
Google Summer of Code students. I follow other outreach efforts in Free Software and try to bring the best 
practices to GNOME. For example, after seeing OpenHatch workshop participants learn a lot by following 
step-by-step missions, I created, with the help of others, a newcomers tutorial for GNOME that 40 new 
contributors have completed so far.

I would like to serve on the board to have a broader view into how we can ensure that GNOME is thriving as a 
project and a community, and to find the most effective ways I can apply my abilities and experience to help 
make it happen.

Thanks,
Marina