[FFmpeg-devel] Outreachy

Yayoi Ukai yayoi.ukai at gmail.com
Thu Sep 10 08:20:48 CEST 2015


Hi,

The below is the draft of the letter. Please let me know, if you have
any opinion about it.

Yayoi


Dear (Name of the candidate sponsor organization),

FFmpeg(https://www.ffmpeg.org) is the leading multimedia framework,
able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and
play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It
supports formats from the most obscure up to the cutting edge. No
matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the
community or a corporation.

We have been working on increasing the diversity in our community
while adhering to high standards. We welcome everyone and everyone's
contributions in many different forms.

While we have been putting a lot of effort to recruit women and other
underrepresented populations in technical field, our progress has been
slower than we had been hoped for. We still have fewer female
contributors compared to other FOSS organizations.

Since the end of last year, we have participated in a program called
Outreachy(http://outreachy.org), which was the successor of the GNOME
project's Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and we significantly
increased our representation of women by accepting the interns from
this program. The selected interns were given an opportunity to
contribute to FFmpeg full time for 3 months with the stipend that is
provided by the program. Our last two interns successfully completed
the program. We gave them several options for projects to contribute
to FFmpeg, in the same format as the Google Summer of Code. They made
notable contributions and the candidates who were not selected also
chose to contribute code to the project.

In order to accept an intern from the Outreachy program, we either
have to provide $6500 of our own funding to Outreachy (from our
limited funds) or we need to find a company or organization which can
sponsor our intern. Last year, Samsung sponsored one intern for us.

We would like to invite your organization to be a sponsor for our interns.
We ask for $6500 to cover the required amount for one Outreachy intern
($5500  for the stipend for the intern, $500 for a travel grant, and
$500 for administrative fees.) However, we will be happy to accept any
contribution for this program. If your organization can support one
intern, please let us know by the Nov 2nd deadline for the upcoming
December 2015 round.

We are pleased to contribute to increasing diversity in the technology
community and help advance the technical careers of people belonging
to underrepresented groups. Being an intern and having an experience
contributing to FFmpeg, which is highly valued in the technology
industry, makes them stand-out candidates for further opportunities.
We also hope that selected interns will choose to continue to
contribute to FFmpeg, increasing the health of the project.

Your contribution will directly support our efforts for diversity in
our community and advance the careers of underrepresented minorities
in general.  Please let us know if you have any questions about
supporting our interns. You can contact us.
.(.. name of the contact..)  We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 11:52 PM, Yayoi Ukai <yayoi.ukai at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> These are my questions:
>
> - If you have an email template that you used for your last
> fundraiser, I am happy to use some of it. If not, I will write one
> based on outreachy's sample email and I will send it you to look over.
> (It will go out all the companies who would be a potential sponsor,
> right? So I really want to make sure that people are happy with what
> is written.)
>
> - I also want a contact list that you used for your last fundraiser as
> well. If you don't have one, you can send me the list of the companies
> who gave ffmpeg money before (either donation or contract work) and
> contact information from these companies. This is important because we
> have to coordinate with Outreachy for asking for donations from big
> companies. Also, it is important to contact a lot of companies since
> fundraising is not so easy.
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions and suggestions.
>
> Thank you,
> Yayoi


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