I’ve started this blog talking abut the OPW, Mozilla and the internship I’ll begin soon. But…OPW…What is this?

OPW stands for Outreach Program For Women and, as the name may imply, it’s a program aimed to provide tech internships to women organized by GNOME Foundation and inspired by Google Summer of Code. This program aims to encourage women to take part in FOSS projects guiding them through their first contributions. It first started with a round in 2006 with the GNOME Foundation, and then resumed in 2010 with editions organized every half a year. Now many other FOSS organizations have joined the program.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that gives the user the freedom to use, copy, study, change, and improve it. There are many Free and Open Source Software licenses under which software can be released with these freedoms. FOSS contributors believe that this is the best way to develop software because it benefits society, creates a fun collaborative community around a project, and allows anyone to make innovative changes that reach many people. FOSS contributors do various things: software development, system administration, user interface design, graphic design, documentation, community management, marketing, identifying issues and reporting bugs, helping users, event organization, and translations.[source]

Among the participating organizazions of this round there is Mozilla and this is the organization I’ve applied for.
I’ve always thought that FOSS projects were something for an elite of people: a closed world, difficult to approach. It’s nice to see that OPW has already proved me wrong: I come closer and closer to a community of triagers, developers and users spread throughout the world. I can be part of something, and this will certainly make me a better person on both the personal and professional side.

This world needs human beings, all gender of human beings not only men 🙂