X.Org Women Outreach Program Only Turns Up Two Applicants So Far

Earlier this month it was announced that the X.Org Foundation would participate in the next FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW) organized by the GNOME Foundation. This program is very controversial but one thing is for sure: there isn't much interest from women in getting involved with X.Org.

The Outreach Program for Women pays out $5,500 USD per female (or anyone who identifies as "genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth") plus a $500 travel allowance to work on a particular open-source project task for a few months. The task doesn't necessarily have to be coding related but just anything involved with the project from working on graphics to documentation. While GNOME started the OPW and they continue to organize it, many free software projects have become involved and this December will be the first time the X.Org Foundation is participating.

The X.Org OPW doesn't have to necessarily involve the X.Org Server but could be about another associated effort like Wayland or Mesa. While there's lots of things that could be done to improve/help the X.Org Foundation, even with the lots of attention drawn to the X.Org OPW when it was announced, there's been very few applicants.

At today's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting it was shared that thus far only two people have applied for this program... One project proposed is for adding more XCB extensions and the other proposal is for a server-side XCB implementation. Confirmation can be found via the X.Org BoD meeting log.

Women looking to potentially get involved with X.Org through the OPW program can learn more via the X.Org Wiki.