Tech internships

The OLPC Tech Team is now soliciting applications for several summer intern positions described below. These challenging internships will offer the successful applicant opportunities to:

• Take extraordinary responsibility for creating or extending software that improves the lives and educations of hundreds of thousands of children, world-wide, this year,
• Explore the vibrant open-source community that sustains OLPC's technology offerings,
• Benefit from the collective experience of some of the most talented, driven minds in the computer technology world,
• Enjoy the beauty and fun of Cambridge, MA with the benefit of the handsome compensation of $550/week,

Interested persons should write to internships@rt.laptop.org with a resume and with a cover letter containing links to material demonstrating the applicant's ingenuity, knowledge, adaptability, and drive. OLPC will acknowledge the receipt of these materials and will interview selected applicants before making offers on April 15. Applicants are further encouraged to demonstrate their abilities and commitment to OLPC's goals by volunteering for OLPC as they are able. You must be 18 years of age or older on April 15 in order to apply.

Mentors

In order to increase the probability of creating a successful internship experience, OLPC employees who wish to mentor interns are required to sponsor those interns for consideration by the entire Tech Team. By agreeing to sponsor an intern, a mentor is committing to the rest of the Tech Team to work with and support that intern throughout the summer. Since this is a serious responsibility, potential mentors will likely want to know as much as possible about the abilities and inclinations of their candidate. However, since there are likely to be many more applicants than mentors, we have decided to facilitate this match-making by asking mentors to write 'advertisements' describing the qualities they're looking for and giving links to examples of their work for the project. These 'advertisements' follow:

Michael Stone

Michael was recruited as a Summer '07 intern when he, Michael Burns, and Noah Kantrowitz were asked to prototype Rainbow, the isolation shell described by Bitfrost. He continues to work on this project and also devotes substantial effort to improving the Build system and OLPC's parent software distribution, Fedora. Michael is looking for two adventurous, scientifically minded interns who would like to show the world what's possible by, for example:

• globally improving error detection and reporting logic throughout the upper half of the stack, or
• prototyping a Bitfrost identity and communications security service, or
• improving boot, Sugar, or activity-launching performance by 50% or more.