X.Org Foundation Decides On Its Women Outreach Project

At yesterday's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting they approved one project for the Outreach Program for Women.

This winter is the X.Org Foundation's first time participating in the Outreach Program for Women, run by the GNOME Foundation and encourages women (or anyone associating as a women) to become involved with free software either through coding, marketing, graphics, documentation, or nearly any other task.

Early on there were just two X.Org OPW submissions while in the end a third student applied but for one of the same projects. While at first it looked like they might be able to finance two projects, in the end they had the money for just one woman.

Two proposals were for working on server-side XCB and the third project was on porting old Glean tests to Piglit. In the end they settled for Asal Mirzaeva's proposal from Ukraine to work on the server-side XCB. Here's the goal of the server-side XCB work: "The goal is that byte-swapping code in the X-Server is automatically generated from the XCB protocol definitions. Switching from the old manually written code to the automatically generated code should be possible at X11-extension granularity. So that the automatically generated code can be used for those extensions which are already supported in XCB with a quality that's sufficient for server-side usage. Also, quality should be ensured by automatic tests which compare the old manual byte-swapping code with the new automatically generated code. The test-cases may run outside of the X-Server, just using both code-variants."

Asal was selected of the three since she's unemployed and not going to school, compared to the other two with such outside obligations that would make it more difficult to put in the required amount of time working on the project. Asal will be paid $5500 USD to work on the project from December to March.

Female contributors to X.Org and related projects are unfortunately very rare.

Besides just seeing three girls applying for the X.Org OPW being unfortunate, it's a bit surprising the geographic make-up: one was from Ukraine, one from India, and one from Africa. While the application process was open for weeks and widely published on Phoronix and elsewhere, not a single woman from the Americas or Western Europe applied.