Date of Grant: July 8, 2020
Grant Amount: $100,000 in 2020; planned $100,000 in 2021

Outreachy is an internship program organized to promote diversity in free and open source software (FOSS), offering paid remote opportunities that matches interns with mentors from one of the many participating free software communities. The program is fiscally sponsored by Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

ARDC has provided Outreachy with $100,000 in funding for these paid internships in 2020, and plans to provide an additional $100,000 in funding in 2021.

You can see the interns and the free software projects they are working on, many of which are relevant to ARDC’s mission here: outreachy.org/alums/.

Update

Women are underrepresented in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development, even as compared with the number of women studying Computer Science in colleges around the world and with the number of women employed in proprietary software development. While the 2017 GitHub survey showed that participation of women in FOSS is still extremely low at 3%, Outreachy has been a major factor in increasing participation of women in communities that participate. For example, the percentage of women Linux kernel authors rose from 5% in 2005 to 9.9% in 2016, with a marked increase in 2013 when the kernel joined Outreachy. Outreachy also encourages women who are students interested in coding projects to apply for Google Summer of Code, and it played a role in increasing participation of women in Google Summer of Code from 7.1% in 2011 to 11.6% in 2018.

In 2020 when ARDC initially began supporting Outreachy, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a large percentage of our grantees. One advantage of the remote nature of this program was that it was able to continue its work and saw increased demand from people hoping to participate. The Outreachy program has a broad reach, with around 3000 initial applicants each round from all over the world. With support from ARDC, Outreachy was able to offer over 100 internships in 2020 and add on additional contracted assistance to help handle the influx of demand.