OPW/Outreachy Has 30 Summer Projects For Encouraging Women In Open-Source

Outreachy, the program formerly known as GNOME OPW, has announced their selected participants who will be engaging with various open-source projects over the next few months.

The latest round of Outreachy runs from May through August and the selected participants were announced this week. For those unfamiliar with this program, the focus is, "helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations."

Outreachy still is focused on encouraging women (or those identifying as women) to get involved with open-source software, but in the future they're looking to open it up to more "under-represented" groups. Their site explains, "The current round of internships was open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender. We are planning to expand the program to more participants from underrepresented backgrounds in the future."

Those interested in seeing the projects for the thirty accepted participants, they're listed on the GNOME Wiki. While lots of the accepted projects come down to documentation, testing, and maintenance tasks, some of the more interesting projects are listed below. Outreachy participants are paid $5,500 USD.

- Usability testing in GNOME.

- API regression testing in FFmpeg.

- OpenCV gesture detection in GStreamer.

- Modernizing Linux wireless drivers.

- Web design and development work on Air Mozilla.