Summer Interns for GNOME Accessibility

["Stormy Peters" <stormy gnome org>]

GNOME Accessibility folks, 

We have the opportunity to have two summer interns working on GNOME Accessibility issues during the summer of 2009. We just need to come up with projects and mentors!

Background:

At the Grace Hopper conference this year I went to a panel about the Humanitarian FOSS Project, www.hfoss.org. As a result I met Trishan de Lanerolle, the project
director, as well as Professor Ralph Morelli from Trinity College.

The
Humanitarian FOSS project is bringing students into software
development by appealing to them with open source humanitarian
projects. They've had a lot of success over the past two years. They
bring all the students together on a university campus, house them, pay
them and give them open source software projects to work on. The
students have access to each other, professors and remote mentors from
the project. Past projects have included working on disaster recovery
software, volunteer scheduling software and medical imaging software.

Another benefit from my perspective is that
the humanitarian aspect brings in people that might not traditionally
have been drawn to open source. (They were at the Grace Hopper
conference because last summer's group included quite a few women.)

Their
project is 100% funded by an NFS grant right now although they'd
like to have companies fund additional interns in the future. 

What is being offered to us:

• Two interns during the summer of 2009, housed at Trinity, paid by Trinity, with professors to help them.
  

What we would need to come up with:

• Projects:
• projects that a novice coder could get started on
• humanitarian focus (accessibility is good)
• something they can make good progress and complete in a summer
  
• Mentors
• mentoring is done via email and skype

Does this sound like a good idea? Something you are interested in? Thoughts?

Stormy