Outreach Program for Women? Reaching out is good. Making money is good too, and the pay ... yeah, all things are relative, and this gig doesn't last forever ... but did you check out the stipend? It's five grand, you guys. $5,000.

For the history & tradition buffs, this is not unlike how programmer-work was done, in the old days. Programming was not a career for people who wanted a nice, set routine. You went from one, temporary employment situation, to another. Most of them were like big construction projects, with serious corporations or government putting out the call for maybe a few hundred coders. 3, 6, 9 months later, the new software was working, you were flush, and not in a hurry to find the next job.

A lot of people loved the old system, and were a bit heart-broken, when it (mostly) ended.

This internship-program is obviously a smart thing to be involved with, in order to make contacts with working professionals in the field, and that is important. But the real opportunity that I see in this system, is that it creates a safe-but-real context in which to show that you can select a suitable (for you) coding-task, put & keep yourself to it, and deliver the agreed-upon results, on time.

It's hard to manage software, as a business. It cooperates, like the weather, or cats.

For prospective employers to be able to see that a new worker in the field knows what she can do, what she can not do, knows how to constructively fill a given block of time (ie, budgetary cash), and bring a worthwhile, pre-selected software goal to fruition, within the darn limits that, yeah-huh, everyone from Steven Jobs to Kat Hagan has to bow to .... this is a real confidence-booster for anyone responsible for hiring code-help.

This is about encouraging women to program, but it's also about the difficulty the industry-side of 'technology' is having, finding people to work in large organizations. (Mostly, because they need such large numbers of people.) Some are attracted to that, and some hope to avoid it .... but it's a big deal, heavy-duty, important, and they are struggling to fill positions.

Tech-leaders - powerful execs - are pestering Congress, to give them a special break on highly-trained immigrant workers, because they are scrambling to keep their enterprises staffed. It is no coincidence, that Google runs the Google Summer of Code. They - Google - need to pull out the stops, to make things happen, to keep good people coming into the business.

And everybody knows, that nearly half the potential work-force, is not in the market.