WSOP article

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

Greets all,

Here is the draft of the WSOP article that I have coauthored with Hanna
Wallach from the WSOP itself.

This may still be rough around the edges, and we don't really do
American spellings, so there may be hidden surprises.

It mentions photos, there are 6. I am touching them up for use in the
article, but I thought I would get the article in first.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
08B0 341A 0B9B 08BB 2118  C060 2EDD BB4F 5191 6CDA

"""
 You have almost certainly heard of Google's Summer of Code, but perhaps you
 haven't heard of the Women's Summer Outreach Program, which is also being run
 by the GNOME Foundation this summer. Davyd Madeley teams up with Hanna Wallach
 to find out more.
"""

The Women's Summer Outreach Program
===================================

This year GNOME received 181 submissions for Google's "Summer of Code" -- not
one was from a woman.

This imbalance is hardly surprising though. In 2002, it was reported that
a staggeringly low 1.5% of libre software contributors were women, compared to
roughly 28% in the proprietary software world. This disparity has numerous
causes. For example, the 2006 FLOSSPOLS report found that the age at which men
and women are able to start tinkering and installing free software on their own
computer can differ significantly. Girls, on average, typically receive their
first computer at age 19, as opposed to boys at age 15.

Working closely with the GNOME Foundation, developers Hanna Wallach and Chris
Ball put together the Women's Summer Outreach Program.
The program aims to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. "It was clear to us
that the GNOME community can't be the inclusive group we want it to be without
putting in some effort," said Chris. Funded with money received by the Foundation for participating
in the Summer of Code, the program originally offered the chance for
three applicants to receive a stipend of 
US$3000 to work for two months on a mentored, GNOME-related project. The only
requirements where that the applicant was a female student and wanted to work a
kick-arse development project.

A key issue at stake is male domination in the libre software movement, where
GNOME is no exception. While six new female developers won't make a staggering amount of difference to this problem, Chris and Hanna are hopeful that the program will still have a significant amount of impact. In the short term, GNOME will get six
awesome women working on six exciting projects. Longer term, they hope that the program participants will continue to actively participate in the GNOME
community, encouraging other women to get involved as well.
One of the major things missing from free software right now are strong female role models. It would be fantastic if the WSOP changed this for GNOME.

"We're not trying to artificially raise the percentage of female GNOME developers
up to 50%;" Chris emphasizes, "we're trying to start a bootstrapping process
that gets *some* female developers involved with GNOME in a way that will
create a positive feedback loop."

An impressive 100 applications were received from femme devels spread
across the globe in just under a fortnight.
"We had far more applications with excellent technical
merit than slots to fill; all of the applications on our shortlist
were extremely high in quality," Chris told GNOME Journal. In fact, the
applications were of such high quality that Google stepped
forward to provide the funds for three additional projects, bringing the program
up to six participants.

Unfortunately, not everyone who applied for the WSOP could be chosen.
"We've been thrilled to see that
several of the applicants whom we weren't able to accept have mentioned wanting
to work on their proposal on their own," said Chris. An unpaid mentoring scheme has been proposed as part of the successful GNOME Love project. This scheme,
taking many attributes of the mentoring from Summer of Code and WSOP, would
allow both men and women to undertake mentored work in the GNOME project.

The Foundation hopes that the WSOP will act as a pilot program for other
organizations hoping to make more women feel welcome in their development
communities. Perhaps the most important outcome is that this program be seen 
as a clear demonstration that things can be done to encourage women to 
participate in open source, even in what has traditionally been considered an
exclusively male arena.


The Participants
----------------

Of the 100 applicants, six were chosen to participate in the WSOP, each based
on the quality and utility of her application. The participants come from 5 different countries, and include both undergraduate and graduate students.

--

[PHOTO: Fernanda, right aligned]

Fernanda Foertter was born in Brazil, but is now a citizen of the United States.
With a physics major under her belt, she is now doing a doctorate in materials
science at the University of Florida. Her project is gJournaler, an
"iTunes-inspired" cataloging system for PDF journal articles. "Two years of grad
school is frustrating," Fernanda explains. "You have to read hundreds of papers
and have no real good (open source) solution to catalog them."

--

[PHOTO: �ran, left aligned]

�ran Kamar is an undergraduate computer engineer from the Izmir Institute of
Technology in Turkey, now in her fourth year of study. She is working on an
Evince plugin for Mozilla-based web browsers. �ran hopes to be an ambassador
for Turkish women in libre software.

"There are many women programmers interested in Linux in my country, but they
lack the courage to join projects and lead the women's community. I am
expecting this project will be a landmark for the Turkish women's community,
helping them to be more confident in joining Linux-based projects,"
she told GNOME Journal.

--

[PHOTO: Cecilia, right aligned]

Cecilia Gonz�z is at the Politechnical University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona and is also in her fourth year of her computer engineering degree. Since she
started using free software, she has wanted to contribute to the community.
With an interest in performance, her project will be to work on optimizing the
switching of components in the Evolution groupware suite.

"I find the GNOME community very human and always interested in our work;
I feel happy to be working in a such project." she says, "It will be great if I can
participate actively in the community after the WSOP."

--

[PHOTO: Clare (Dec 05), left aligned]

>From McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, Clare So is in the first year of
her PhD in computer science. Her project is to define and implement formula editing functionality in the GtkMathView widget, used to display MathML in AbiWord and other applications. She is also interested in looking at research aspects of her project.

"It all started from my summer employment in 2002 at the Ontario Research Center
for Computer Algebra," she writes in her blog, "Since then, I have been
interested in various topics in Mathematical Knowledge Management, which
includes research in MathML-related technologies."

--

[PHOTO: Monia, right aligned]

Monia Ghobadi is an Iranian studying at the University of Victoria in Canada's
British Columbia. She has been working towards her masters in Computer Science
since September last year. She got involved with the WSOP because of an interest
in open source software development and because she wanted to learn about Linux
programming. Being new to North America, she missed out on the Google Summer of
Code, and GNOME's WSOP gave her a second chance to be involved in such a great
program.

Monia is working on integrating GNOME Terminal with GNU Screen, a console based "screen manager"
that multiplexes multiple interactive shells onto a single terminal. "My
mentors are incredible. The community is wonderful. I'd love to
remain a part of GNOME," she replied when asked how she found working with the
rest of the GNOME community. "I'd like to thank GNOME and encourage all the
students to participate in these programs," she added.

--

[PHOTO: Maria, left aligned]

Maria Soler is from Catalonia in Spain, but studying in Aarhus, Denmark.
After doing three years of mathematics, she decided to study electronic
engineering. Having completed her engineering degree, she will start a 
specialist course in industrial software this August. Her project, syncing 
Tomboy notes between computers, is a chance for her to make a useful 
contribution to the free software community while learning Mono and C#.

Maria had previous experience with the GNOME community through the GNOME
Translation Project and the Catalan translation team.

--

Already, the program has been a huge success. All six participants say they are
enjoying working with the GNOME community and that their mentors have been
really positive and encouraging. They all hope to remain part of the GNOME
community after the summer's program is over.

"I want to thank GNOME and Google for giving women an opportunity to shine in
the developer community," wrote Fernanda, "I hope the open source community will
begin to see the benefit of encouraging more women to participate."

Would You Like To Know More?
----------------------------
You can find out more about the WSOP from the press release and project page on
the GNOME.org website:

 * http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/wsop.html
 * http://www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/

The FLOSSPOLS report and recommendations are available from:
 * http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf - Report
 * http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Gender_Policy_Recommendations.pdf - Recommendations with regards to EU policy

If you want to follow the progress of the six participants, a
WSOP planet has been set up:

 * http://planet.gnome.org/wsop2006/

About the Authors
-----------------

<a href="http://join-the-dots.org/";>Hanna Wallach</a>
is in the final year of her Ph.D. in the University of
Cambridge's Inference Group, working on Bayesian inference for machine
learning problems. In her not-so-spare time, Hanna contributes to both
GNOME and Debian, and is involved in several projects that encourage
women to participate in free software development. Her favorite
videogame is Rez.

<a href="http://www.davyd.id.au/";>Davyd Madeley</a>
is an undergraduate computer scientist and electronic engineer
at the University of Western Australia, who moonlights as the GNOME Applets
maintainer and a writer for GNOME Journal. Among other things, he produces the
popular GNOME "sneak peak" articles. He collects plush penguins and plays the
tenor saxophone.