Dear tech ambassadors, please help spreading this call for Google Summer of Code candidates in your projects. Thank you!
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Quim Gil* qgil@wikimedia.org Date: Thursday, March 13, 2014 Subject: URGENT call for geographical diversity in Wikimedia @ GSoC To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Please forward this email wisely. Yes, we need your help getting the word out.
So far, all our GSoC candidates come from only two (neighbor) countries: India and Sri Lanka. While we are very happy seeing how popular Wikimedia is among technical students in the Indian subcontinent, we are concerned about the lack of candidates from anywhere else.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2014#Candidates
GSoC 2013 had accepted students from 69 countries [1], and we have participants from eight.[2] We can discuss about the deep causes of this situation but... Considering that we have less than 9 days before the GSoC deadline for students (March 21 @ 19:00 UTC) we should focus on finding new candidates.
There is still time to become a strong GSoC candidate for Wikimedia. Many project ideas in our GSoC page (linked above) have mentors available and no candidates yet. Go for them! Also, since our evaluation of candidates is based on their proposals published in mediawiki.org, Google's deadline is not a hard stop to keep improving your plans together with your mentors. April 7 is when we need to decide how many slots we will request, meaning how many teams (candidates and mentors with a common plan) we believe that can complete GSoC 2014 successfully. That date is more than three weeks from now.
Diversity is an important factor for Wikimedia. We are putting a lot of effort promoting gender diversity in our outreach programs, and we are seeing good progress. It would be surprising to realize that a global project like Wikimedia has a serious problem with geographical diversity. Your ideas and actions to fix this situation are welcome.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/ProgramStatistics [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013
PS: in comparison, FOSS OPW is doing a lot better, with five candidates from four countries https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_8#Candi... coincidence?