Open source internships

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The following people put their name down to continue the conversation in this topic: Vipal Gupta

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One existing program in this area is the LibreCorps program at the Rochester Institute of Technology FOSS@MAGIC initiative. One interesting part of the program is students come from a variety of backgrounds – not just code. There is also a focus on process development and open source community.

Pulled from the website:

LibreCorps is a FOSS@MAGIC Initiative connecting RIT students interested in open source to Humanitarian and Civic coding opportunities. Specifically, opportunities for Co-Operative Education Placements , a.k.a. Co-Ops (full-time paid internships), that are part of graduation requirements. For five years, students were successfully placed in positions with

LibreCorps students work in two major areas on Co-Ops. The first, not surprisingly, is technology. The second is FOSS process and Community. Many NGO and civic organizations put open-licensed work in repositories without a plan to build and maintain a community of contributors around their technology. LibreCorps worked with UNICEF Innovation this past year to do just that and examples of that work can be found in this presentation and long-term roadmap to do so.

LibreCorps is also interested in joint projects across international campuses.

This effort is driven by Stephen Jacobs and he is the best person to get in touch with about this. As a past participant in the program, I’m also happy to answer questions or help start new conversations.

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Thanks @pia, I seem to have missed this topic completely that I wanted to discuss after Sustain Summit. I touched upon this topic and its prominence from where I am coming from in the SOS podcast as well. Open-Source Internships is something I felt could be a great way to involve beginners to contribute much more intuitively into Open-Source projects and organizations.

At the time of Sustain, I spent considerable time seeking one for myself as well, but couldn’t find anything that matched the criteria, anything could help me support myself and spend time contributing to a project more constructively. I did find something that I am extremely happy with now! Hence, I wanted to reach out for help as well as help others who were on the same path.

What I am looking for, is not just internships for folks like me (Students) but also any and all programs that can help out people in the same way. Which is being able to contribute to a project in a particular direction and getting some support (Maybe financial) along the way. That way, we ensure people stay attached to the project, with a stable flow of new (skilled) dedicated contributors coming in every year. And who knows maybe, people performing well could be hired by those same companies. Which results in a win-win for all.

Hence, we are seeing a huge upward trend of especially Indian students working towards getting into Summer of Code (GSoC last year had over 650 out of 1200 approx), Outreachy internships, fellowships, contribution fests, and even code bounties. One could see the same trend in Africa as Samson mentioned. Many of my friends are now working diligently at the time of their projects under these programs and sticking around long after finishing it. I loved working with Sugar Labs, and now even if I am not able to give all the time to it. I love the Outreach work that we have been doing the past year and I think, it wouldn’t have happened with my GSoC with Sugar Labs back in 2018.

This thread is quite old, and I didn’t want to revive this topic with anything on hand. So, I found some resources that we often share in our open-source community in ALiAS, who are looking for internships and programs. I hope people finding this can benefit from the same,

Thanks, @jwf Great to connect with you. One of my friends is an Outreachy Intern with Fedora. I think it’s your project only. Great work with happiness packets. Love them! Thank you for LibreCorps, I have heard of it with my time in Sugar Labs. I enjoy exploring more and more programs to get more experience as well as I am trying to start one in my university as well.
Thanks!

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It’s a small world. :smile:

If you want to bounce ideas on your university FOSS program, let me know. I can share my experiences and also connect you to some folks at Red Hat who are leading university engagement efforts in India. They might have more culturally-aware feedback than what I could give.

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I wanted to highlight an article about LibreCorps that published this week on Opensource.com. LibreCorps is a student-driven, faculty-led internship program for open source at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

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Trying to figure out how to build in design/UX internships in already existing FOSS internships or start to try harder to create more of these opportunities is something the Design & UX WG talk about quite a lot.

If there’s some the Design & UX WG can feed into this around internships then let me know!

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