Re: News posts needed

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Hi!

Thank you for getting started on the news story about GSoC!

I am not sure what content we would like to put into the OPW press release and what content we would like to put into the news piece about GSoC. We should definitely coordinate these, and see if they need to be two separate stories, or if we can combine them into one.

Below are my notes for the OPW press release that I also just shared with Karen. Karen was going to work them in into the press release, that will also include the news about the Conservancy project joining OPW with Twisted, welcoming the FSF as a new sponsor of OPW, thanking all the sponsors, and announcing new participants. Let's see how that works out, and decide based on that how to divide or combine the information in the stories and cross-link them.

I'm also including a few inline comments below.

Thanks!
Marina

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organizing the Outreach Program for Women helped GNOME improve our resources for newcomers and the experience of Google Summer of Code applicants. It also helped us extend the effort in getting more women involved to other free software organizations.

When we started the current Outreach Program for Women two years ago, we had an initial list of 9 mentors from 8 projects who were eager to help with the program. Connecting newcomers with mentors who can guide them in their initial contributions proved to be the most important aspect of our outreach effort. For that reason, we recently moved the list of mentors we built up for the Outreach Program for Women to be a part of the GNOME Love initiative. There are now 37 mentors from 22 projects whom any newcomer can contact any time throughout the year in this ever-growing list. We also started a page on the Google Summer of Code wiki that contains links to such lists of mentors in many free software organizations. That page currently has 15 organizations. In addition to being a general resource we pointed students looking for an organization to join to, we used it to spread the word about Google Summer of Code and mentorship opportunities among technical women groups at many universities.

We learned that requiring an initial contribution to the project an applicant is applying for increases their involvement with the project, prepares them for the work during the internship period, and serves as an important selection criteria. This year, we required the students applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on, not just to supply a link to a bug they fixed in any free software project. We also emphasized the need to communicate with a potential mentor for the idea the student is proposing and included who the potential mentors are for each project idea we had. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor. For the accepted Google Summer of Code students, we changed our requirement for weekly updates on a dedicated mailing list to a requirement for blog post updates every two weeks that will be aggregated on Planet GNOME. This will allow for a greater visibility of the students' projects.

We are very proud of the accomplishments of the last round's interns, which include the following.

 * Kasia Bondarava committed Belarusian translations for 35 GNOME modules. With her help, Belarusian translation coverage went from 67% to 88%, making Belarusian a new officially supported language. She also made a comprehensive comparison of different translator tools and advocated for better translator comments.
 * Christy Eller has tremendously improved the web development process in GNOME and created the new Friends of GNOME pages.
 * Susanna Huhtanen created comprehensive developer documentation about writing GNOME applications in JavaScript.
 * Patricia Santana Cruz added support for sharing videos and images with different online services, improved hotplug connection of camera devices, and added recorded time when making a video in the Cheese webcam application.
 * Sophia Yu ported Swell Foop game from JavaScript to Vala, completely reworking its implementation, and updated several other games to use new GNOME APIs.

The detailed accomplishments of all 12 program participants can be found at https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011/Accomplishments

Outreach Program for Women participants have a strong tradition of becoming mentors in GNOME. Luciana Fujii Pontello and Ekaterina Gerasimova mentored Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women participants in previous rounds. Tiffany Antopolski, Anita Reitere and Srishti Sethi mentored Google Code-In participants. This round, Christy Eller will co-mentor a Web Development intern and Tiffany Antopolski will mentor 4 Documentation interns, 3 of whom will be working on Developer Documentation along with Tiffany.

Another big help from participants from previous rounds was a cartoon that better explained the Outreach Program for Women application process, created by Liansu Yu, Christy Eller, Meg Ford, and Tamara Atanasoska. It was featured on the program's page and we hope helped make the application process more approachable and easier to understand.

More notes inline
     |||
     vvv

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karen Sandler" <karen gnome org>
> To: "Oliver Propst" <oliver propst gmail com>
> Cc: "Allan Day" <allanpday gmail com>, "GNOME Marketing List" <marketing-list gnome org>, "Marina Zhurakhinskaya"
> <marinaz redhat com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2012 12:09:29 AM
> Subject: Re: News posts needed
>
> On Wed, April 25, 2012 6:57 pm, Oliver Propst wrote:
> > Here comes a rough draft on the Google Summer of Code story.
> > It would be great if you (or someone else) could edit and publish.
>
> Thanks for putting a draft together! Marina and I are starting to put
> together a press release for the OPW, and she pointed out that we
> should
> highlight how much we improved the GSoC application process in GNOME
> when
> talking about GSoC.
>
> I'm ccing Marina...
> karen
>
> >
> > Students accepted for Google Summer of Code (headline)
> > The GNOME foundation are happy to announce that 29 students have
> > been
> > accepted for this year edition of Google Summer of Code. The
> > students
> > will work on a wide range of projects including improving aspects
> > of
> > of the GNOME shell, develop new GNOME applications, update existing
> > GNOME applications
> > with new features and improve underlying GNOME technology.

We should definitely mention the changes we made in GSoC in a story like that. I.e. what I have in the third paragraph above.

We shouldn't mention "develop new GNOME applications". We encouraged people to propose agreed-upon, manageable projects. We generally consider developing new applications to not be manageable by a student, unless the student is a very established contributor. I think the only proposal we accepted that could be seen as for the new application is the one for the Lockdown Editor, but it is more of a utility tool than a user facing application.

I'd be great to highlight some of the applications or technologies that the students will work on. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-April/msg00176.html has an easily readable list.

> >
> > The students work will result in a better GNOME for all users.
> >
> > The GNOME foundation wish all the students good luck with their
> > respective project and want to give a special thanks to the mentors
> > that help
> > guide the students.
> >
> > For more information about the accepted projects please visit
> > <a
> > heft="http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/gnome";>
> > the GNOME project page on the Google Summer of Code website<a/>
> >
> >
> >
> > .
> > .
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>
> > wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> There are a few things happening at the moment that it would be
> >> great
> >> to have news articles on. As always, we just need something short,
> >> informative and tailored to a wide audience.
> >>
> >> Â * Foundation board elections [1]
> >>
> >> Â * Google Summer of Code announcements [2, 3]
> >>
> >> Â * 3.6 feature planning [4, 5]
> >>
> >> It would be great if anyone wants to write posts for any of these.
> >> :)
> >>
> >> Allan
> >>
> >> [1]
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2012-April/msg00015.html
> >> [2]
> >> http://google-opensource.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/students-announced-for-google-summer-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+GoogleOpenSourceBlog+%28Google+Open+Source+Blog%29
> >> [3]
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-April/msg00176.html
> >> [4] https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointFive/Features/
> >> [5]
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-April/thread.html
> >> --
> >> IRC: Â aday on irc.gnome.org
> >> Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
> >> --
> >> marketing-list mailing list
> >> marketing-list gnome org
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > -Mvh Oliver Propst
> > --
> > marketing-list mailing list
> > marketing-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
> >
>
>
>