[gnome-women] Outreach Program for Women quarterly update

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Hi all,

I'd like to start sharing the Outreach Program for Women updates for the GNOME quarterly report with the list in case anybody has anything they would like to add! Please let me know in the next couple days if you'd like to add anything to this update. Also, please feel free to share anything interesting that is related to the women's involvement in GNOME with the list any time!

You can see the previous updates starting with the Q3 2009 report here:
http://foundation.gnome.org/reports

This quarter's (July, August, September, up to the present :) update is below.

Thanks,
Marina

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Outreach Program for Women

by: Marina Zhurakhinskaya

There seemed to be a stronger presence of women at GUADEC this year. We held the first women’s dinner at GUADEC which was attended by 15 women. Everyone really enjoyed meeting and talking to each other. Marina Zhurakhinskaya made short presentations to the GNOME Advisory Board and at the Annual General Meeting about the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) efforts.

We announced the OPW internships for December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011 dates on September 15. Máirín Duffy designed a catchy flyer for the program. Many members of the community helped spread the word by micro-blogging, blogging, sending information to the universities, and handing out flyers at conferences.

We are currently in the middle of the application process with the application deadline on October 25 and accepted participants announcement on November 3. We have already received a good number of applications and inquiries. We should be able to accept at least five participants, with three being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation and two being sponsored by Google. The following page contains all the information about the program: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2010

Stormy Peters attended the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing on September 28 - October 2. She organized the first Free and Open Source Software booth at the conference and participated in the Open Source Track. At the booth, they handed out 180 flyers about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women as well as lots of GNOME stickers - the logo on a field of grass was the most popular. Heidi Ellis also attended - her class at Western New England College is working on Caribou as part of GNOME’s a11y and HFOSS program.

The FSF Womens' Caucus' “Bringing free software to girls and young women” outreach program with the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts and Red Hat has started. Máirín Duffy taught the first class session on October 15. The class will run on a weekly basis through mid-December. Red Hat produced live USB keys with the GNOME-based Fedora Design Suite that were distributed to the girls. Their first project involved photomanipulation with Gimp. Future projects will involve Gimp, Inkscape, and other creative tools. This page contains more information about the course: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Women%27s_Caucus/Girl_Scouts_Free_Software_Outreach

In the next quarter, we look forward to working with the OPW internships participants and introducing them to the community.