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News — 05 March, 2020

Join us this summer for GSoC and Outreachy internships

We, at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are excited to announce our this year's internship programmes around Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy.

Google Summer of Code is a worldwide initiative sponsored by Google that gives university students real-world tech experience and a stipend for working with Open Source projects throughout the summer months.

Outreachy is a global program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented. The program is organized by the Software Freedom Conservancy and is aimed at promoting diversity in tech.

A big shout out and thank you to the Open Source Center of the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) for providing us support as an umbrella organization to take part in these two excellent opportunities, for HOT and as well the students that are going to join the tech team to support HOT’s goals through their work on Free and Open Source Software.

Project Ideas

For GSoC - we’ve 3 project ideas centered around our collaborative mapping tool Tasking Manager and one project on developing and hosting our vector map infrastructure. Tasking Manager project ideas include:

  • Gamification ideas to encourage more and better mapping on the Tasking Manager
  • Development of a Java plugin to let mappers leverage the use of the Tasking Manager within JOSM - the desktop editor for editing on OpenStreetMap
  • Implementation of a solution for automated reporting of the activities in the Tasking Manager to the OpenStreetMap community following the organized editing guidelines.

For Outreachy we have a mix of four ideas covering programming, design and product management:

  • Tasking Manager: Improving the back-end performance
  • Programming of a Slackbot router - to take in multiple commands from Slack users and provide the right results based on the command supplied
  • A research-heavy project to understand and evaluate the User Experience of all HOT tools
  • A project to improve the feedback cycles for our HOT tools

For more information about the projects take a look at our project ideas listed in Github.

Both GSoC and Outreachy are a great way to ramp up your technical skills, you’ll get introduced to the biggest and most relevant geospatial community around OpenStreetMap and HOT. In addition, you are going to experience how to work in a culturally diverse and remote working environment with a global team.

Here’s what we suggest if you’re considering to apply to one of our project ideas:

  • Learn more about us - Familiarize yourself with the OpenStreetMap and HOT community. A good understanding of how we work and think will be useful to grasp our project proposals.
  • Reach out to us over Slack. There is a dedicated #interns channel on our Slack to address any general queries. All the projects will have one of our tech team members working alongside you. You can checkout Github project list and reach out to respective mentors over Slack or mail.
  • Submit work samples. This could be small PR submissions over Github for programming projects or documents from previous work to demonstrate some of the basic skills you’ll need for your summer project.