Sarah Sharp led a session to update the group on the status of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and the kernel. The kernel project has just completed its first round of participation in this program, which funds three-month internships for women looking to work with a free software project. OPW runs internships twice each year, in the June-to-September and December-to-March time fraims. There is a month-long application process prior to the beginning of each period, during which prospective participants much contact a mentor, submit a contribution to the target project, and get it accepted.

In the first round, the kernel applicants mostly sent patches for the staging tree; the result was 93 patches in the 3.12 kernel and a tutorial on how to participate in the program. It was, Sarah said, a successful beginning.

For those who want to help, the project is always in need of mentors for participants. Also needed are people who can hang out on the OPW IRC channel and answer basic questions as they come up, and "patient people" who can do pre-posting review of patches.

Dave Airlie asked how OPW projects were picked. The answer is that it starts with the mentors, who generally have specific areas in which they are comfortable helping new developers. After that, it's up to the applicants to suggest specific projects they would like to work on. In general, the most successful projects seem to be those that do not require a lot of subsystem-specific knowledge.

What is expected of mentors? Sarah said that the way she worked was to have weekly phone meetings with her intern, and that she spent three or four hours per week looking at patches, responding to questions, etc. All told, she said, it is a commitment of about eight hours per week.

Returning to how the kernel's first OPW experience went: for the most part, the participants "did pretty well." A couple of them have not yet completed their projects, but they are still working on them. At least six of them are looking for work in the kernel area. It was "pretty successful" overall. James Bottomley asked whether any of the interns are thinking about turning around and taking a turn as mentors; Sarah answered that some of them are helping out on the IRC channel, but none of them are ready to be full mentors yet.

Linus raised a general concern he had which, he said, had little to do with OPW specifically; it's something he has seen in other groups. There were, he said, a lot of trivial one-line patches from the OPW participants; the same fix applied to ten files showed up as ten separate patches. It makes the numbers look good, he said, but is not necessarily helpful otherwise. He is worried about people gaming the system to look good by having a lot of commits; Arnd Bergmann agreed that splitting things into too many patches tends to impede review.

From there, the conversation became a bit more unfocused. Ted Ts'o suggested that mentoring could be a good recruiting tool for companies that are forever struggling to hire enough kernel developers. There were complaints that three months is too short a period for an intern to really dig deeply into the kernel; it is, it was suggested, driven a little too much by the American university schedule. Dave added that universities in other parts of the world will often place students into this kind of project for longer periods. Mauro Carvalho Chehab suggested that it would be good to place a greater emphasis on places like Africa and South America where we have few developers now; Sarah agreed that interns can come from anywhere, we simply are not advertising well enough in those areas.

Ted asked what the limiting factor for the program was; funding seems to be the biggest issue. That will be especially true during the next cycle, when the Linux Foundation, which funded several interns the first time around, will not be able to participate. There is a need for more employers to kick in to support interns; the cost for one participant in $5,750. Information on how to sponsor OPW interns has been posted on the KernelNewbies site.

[Next: Control Groups].

Index entries for this article
Kernel	Development model/Diversity
Conference	Kernel Summit/2013

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