Welcome to FLOSS Outreach Program for Women interns

I’m glad to announce that Kim Schoonover, Mariya Miteva, Priyanka Nag, Sucheta Ghoshal, Teresa Cho and Valerie Juarez will join the MediaWiki community as full-time interns between January and March 2013. They have been selected as part of the FLOSS Outreach Program for Women, an initiative of the GNOME Foundation, with participation by several other free software projects: Deltacloud, Fedora, JBoss, Mozilla, Open Technology Institute, OpenITP, OpenStack, Subversion, Tor and Wikimedia. A total of 25 women have been selected in this edition.
Each MediaWiki intern will work on a specific project:

• Kim Schoonover (aka ‘Isarra’) is a Wikipedia contributor based in Colorado (USA) with an interest in user experience and design. She has contributed a few patches to MediaWiki projects already. She will work on design documents for Flow, the planned UI for user discussion pages, mentored by Brandon Harris and Heather Walls.
• Mariya Miteva is a Masters of Information Systems Student in New York (USA), although she is originally from Sofia (Bulgaria) and will conduct her internship from there. She will find MediaWiki vendors and define the best ways to work with them, and will also have a backlog of product management tasks. Her mentors are Sumana Harihareswara and James Forrester.
• Priyanka Nag is a Computer Science post-graduate student from Pune (Maharashtra, India). She will work in the documentation of noteworthy local templates, gadgets and styles used in various Wikimedia projects, mentored by Amir E. Aharoni.
• Sucheta Ghoshal is a Computer Science and Engineering student based in Kolkata (West Bengal, India), an active Wikipedia contributor and member of the Wikimedia Kolkata meetup. She will work on the productization of EtherEditor MediaWiki extension. She will be mentored by Mark Holmquist.
• Teresa Cho has double major in Computer Science and Economics and she lives in Redwood City (California, USA). Her project consists of developing a MediaWiki extension to interact with Git repositories, and is mentored by Sébastien Santoro.
• Valerie Juarez has a BS in Computer Science and she lives in Sour Lake (Texas, USA). She will help managing the bug reports, organize a couple of “Bug Days” and will develop a proposal for streamlining user feedback from multiple Wikimedia sources. She will be mentored by Andre Klapper and Quim Gil.

Our mentors assisted about 25 women interested in the MediaWiki community during the application process. From those, 10 submitted full applications, including a project proposal and a microtask completed as part of the submission. We were impressed by the quality of many submissions, but we couldn’t take more due to lack of related mentors and funding. We encourage all applicants to stay around in the MediaWiki community, since we have no doubt they can all become top contributors and have future opportunities.
In addition to the availability of specialized mentors and the quality of the proposals, our selection criteria took into account the diversity of profiles, origins and previous involvement in Wikimedia projects. We had a rather open process for submissions and selection of candidates that gave participants a chance to check other proposals, improve their own and receive public endorsements.
We wish a happy landing to our new interns and the best of luck in their projects! You’ll be hearing more from them over the next few months.
Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator