Hello Yaron, Thanks for the input and suggestions!
For many years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been involved with several externally hosted open source internship programs including Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Outreachy, and more. We have also conducted a Wikimedia Foundation Product & Technology (P&T) Software Engineering Internship Program - it started in 2023 and the current 2025 cohort is in full swing right now. Over the last three years, in the WMF P&T Internship Program, we've sponsored 17 interns on their technical journey. In regards to this year's GSoC program, we have already contacted all the prospective Wikimedia mentors that had signed up to see if they'd be interested in moving their projects to the Outreachy <https://www.outreachy.org/> internship program that officially kicks off in June 2025. Unfortunately, Outreachy has already closed the application period for interns but the mentors and project <https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/> application period is still open until March 7th, 2025. Looking at this from a financial standpoint, both GSoC and Outreachy pay their accepted interns a stipend for their 3 months of work, but the Outreachy stipend actually pays more to their interns - $7,000 - vs the $3,000 that GSoC pays. Outreachy runs two internship programs per year, June - August and December - March. The second program for Outreachy 2025 will have sign ups for mentors and interns starting sometime in the early fall. The next round of the Wikimedia Product & Technology Internship program will kick off in late 2025 with the expectation of the program running from February through June 2026. If you have a specific project that doesn't fit into any of these programs, please let us know and we'll see if we can solve it. Cheers, Deb -- deb tankersley (she/her) developer outreach program management Wikimedia Foundation On Sun, Mar 2, 2025 at 8:47 PM Yaron Koren <yaro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Deb - thanks for explaining what happened. We all make mistakes (except > for this Dennis guy, I suppose!), and it's at least good to know that > Google have not suddenly changed their minds about the Wikimedia Foundation. > > However, perhaps something can be salvaged from this. There have been > various organization-specific mentorship programs that have been directly > inspired by the Google Summer of Code; here are some of them: > > https://mentorship.kde.org/sok/ > https://www.x.org/wiki/XorgEVoC/ > https://www.summerofbitcoin.org/ > > What about having a "Wikimedia Summer of Code" or some such this summer? > It could more or less match what GSoC does, with the same timeframe(s), > same country-specific stipends, etc. Like these other org-specific > programs, it would piggyback on the GSoC concept, so that potential > students will already know what to expect. > > Wikimedia has a big advantage over most other organizations that might > wish to do similar things, in that it already has a funding mechanism that > could be repurposed for this: the Rapid Grants program, whose $5,000 limit > is larger than all but the largest possible GSoC stipends. So in a sense, > nothing (as far as I know) would need to change officially: it would just > be a matter of putting up a wiki page telling potential mentors that they > need to apply via a Rapid Grant, as opposed to the GSoC website. (Of > course, it would be good for anyone handling the Rapid Grant applications > to know to expect a spate of technology-related ones!) > > There have already been some great Wikimedia project ideas this year, and > (as with every year) there are students who are excited to specifically > work on Wikipedia- and Wikimedia-related projects. It would be a shame to > give up on these projects, and also potentially to lose momentum for > upcoming years, if the funding potential is there. > > And yes, I'm aware of Outreachy, which as far as I know is still > happening, but it doesn't allow most of the people who would potentially be > applying for GSoC, so I don't see it as a real substitute. Others may, > however. > > Any thoughts? > > -Yaron > > -- > WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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