Re: Summer Interns for GNOME Accessibility

["Stormy Peters" <stormy gnome org>]

I'm pretty excited too!

They'd like to have the projects picked and paragraphs describing them by the end of January. (They'll provide a template.) That's when they'll start accepting applications, recruiting students, etc. More details to come soon.

So I think our job is to pick projects and find mentors by the end of the month.

Stormy

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 4:25 AM, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:

Stormy:

This is AWESOME!  Many thanks for your promotion of accessibility and for getting GNOME some resources.

We should talk about this in the weekly #a11y meetings on irc.gnome.org, but there's a whole bunch of ideas at http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved.

Some of the things on the top of my list are Evince accessibility and WebKit accessibility.  Both require a bit of in-depth knowledge, though, and would require some strong mentoring.

Another area, which is pretty cool and could use some help, is MouseTrap.  It has a good start, and I'm sure Flavio would welcome help.

Other areas include improving the out-of-the-box experience of GOK, helping "fix" speech, testing, etc.

In any case, the above are just quick thoughts off the top of my head and are not meant to detract from anything I neglected to mention.

Do you have any deadlines or dates where we'd need to get our act together?

Will

Stormy Peters wrote:

GNOME Accessibility folks,

We have the opportunity to have two summer interns working on GNOME Accessibility issues during the summer of 2009. We just need to come up with projects and mentors!

Background:

At the Grace Hopper conference this year I went to a panel about the Humanitarian FOSS Project, www.hfoss.org <http://www.hfoss.org/>. As a result I met Trishan de Lanerolle, the project director, as well as Professor Ralph Morelli from Trinity College.

The Humanitarian FOSS project is bringing students into software development by appealing to them with open source humanitarian projects. They've had a lot of success over the past two years. They bring all the students together on a university campus, house them, pay them and give them open source software projects to work on. The students have access to each other, professors and remote mentors from the project. Past projects have included working on disaster recovery software, volunteer scheduling software and medical imaging software.

Another benefit from my perspective is that the humanitarian aspect brings in people that might not traditionally have been drawn to open source. (They were at the Grace Hopper conference because last summer's group included quite a few women.)

Their project is 100% funded by an NFS grant right now although they'd like to have companies fund additional interns in the future.

What is being offered to us:

   * Two interns during the summer of 2009, housed at Trinity, paid by
     Trinity, with professors to help them.

What we would need to come up with:

   * Projects:

         o projects that a novice coder could get started on
         o humanitarian focus (accessibility is good)
         o something they can make good progress and complete in a summer
   * Mentors
         o mentoring is done via email and skype

Does this sound like a good idea? Something you are interested in? Thoughts?

Stormy

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