FOSSOPW

All good things come to an end, so new and better things can begin

This will be the last post I will be focusing on my FOSS OPW internship with WIkimedia Foundation. But as Frank Herbert has once said, “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story”, this won’t end my contributions to open source or Wikimedia.

FOSS OPW internship has showed me many directions which I can take after I finish the internship. The career guidance given to the interns is very helpful.

Endings are not bad. They are there because you can start something new, motivated from your success and learn from failures. FOSS OPW is a great program which gave me a heap of experience in open culture. Not only that, but also it helped be to identify myself better, identify what I am good at and what should need improvements. It introduced me a great set of people who will remain as my role models forever.

FOSS OPW Intership Starts Today

Internship period for FOSS OPW starts today. Being a proud participant for round 8 with Wikimedia Foundation , my project is “Welcome to Labs – Welcoming new contributors to Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs”.

Wikimedia Labs is a platform to volunteer and experimental development. It is a two part project Dev Labs and Tool Labs. The problem is Wikimedia labs currently face some difficulties in matching new contributors with existing projects. Also their documentation for newcomers needs improvement as well.

Purpose of this project is to have a complete set of newcomer getting started documentation set with complete project landing pages for a each project. Therefore when a new comer comes he/she has a directed guidance to find what are the existing projects and how to contribute to them or how to start a project from scratch. 

I will be blogging my progress throughout the project so await for more details ….

 

 

GSoC Vs FOSSOPW

GSoC (Google Summer of Code) and FOSSOPW (Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) are two of the most widespread open source internship programs. But the number of people who know about FOSSOPW is low considering to GSoC.
GSoC logoopw logo

If you don’t know about GSoC and FOSSOPW visit the following links :

Although both programs support open source community by providing paid internships for the participants and looking similar from outside, they have their differences.

Main differences between GSoC and OPW :

  • OPW targets women as the name suggest, but GSoC has no such constraints
  • You don’t have to be a student to apply for FOSSOPW, but for GSoC you need to be a student to participate
  • You can participate only once in FOSSOPW program, but if you are eligible you can do GSoC as many times you want
  • OPW stipend is also the same as the GSoC stipend which is $5500, but you get additional $500 as a travel allowance
  • While GSoC projects only focused on coding aspects, OPW projects cover a wider field with documentation and outreach projects