GNOME Foundation Offers $9000 to Promote Women's Participation in Open Source Development

The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. The money originates from GNOME's participation in the Google 'Summer of Code' program, for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google's program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google's contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The Women's Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD$3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged.

Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program. The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world and is a standard part of all leading Linux and Unix distributions worldwide, including popular community distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE. It is also the default desktop on major enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Sun Java Desktop System. GNOME's technology is used by major Linux ISVs such as Firefox, the Eclipse Project, Real Networks, and VMWare. Additionally, GNOME is increasingly being used by mobile device companies such as Nokia and Palm.