Outreachy Summer 2019 Applications Open With Expanded Eligibility

Outreachy, the program formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women and intended to get more females and other under-represented groups in technology engaged with Linux/open-source projects, has opened up their application process for those seeking a summer internship while receiving a $5,500 USD stipend.

Outreachy has been going for a number of years now and for the summer 2019 round they've expanded the eligibility slightly to encourage more under-represented groups engaged with open-source development. The main focus of Outreachy remains with "women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people to apply. We also expressly invite applications who are residents and nationals of the United States of America of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander."

But beginning this round, they are also opening the application process to "anyone who faces systemic bias or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is invited to apply." For evaluating the systemic bias or discrimination, an essay question was added to the application process about what discrimination they may have faced or otherwise think they could face in seeking employment.

Also different beginning this round is only students (update: for non-student participants, this restriction does not apply) from the Northern Hemisphere can apply to this May to August round while the Southern Hemisphere round is being deemed the December to March round moving forward.

Another change with Outreachy for students applying is they no longer need to be full-time students but could be part-time students. Questions about school credits/classes have been dropped from the application while warning that false information is against their Code of Conduct.

Among the open-source projects participating in Outreachy for this upcoming round include Fedora to work on "Fedora Happiness Packets", LibreHealth to improve code and documentation, OCaml with testing, OpenStack, and Wikimedia.

More details on this next round of the program at Outreachy.org.