Outreachy report #11: July 2020
Promotion
III Workshop ADAs
I was invited to give a short workshop at the III Workshop ADAs, an annual event ran and organized by an initiative focused on women in technology called Projeto ADAs. It consisted on teaching viewers how Git and GitHub works, and giving them an idea of what a contribution path looks like. In addition to teaching university students about open source in a more practical way, I recommended Outreachy alongside Google Summer of Code and Google Season of Docs as paid opportunities they should consider applying to, and was interviewed by an organizer about my career in open source. That workshop was streamed live on July 4th, and it’s still available on their channel. It was well-received among students and professors.
Backstage
Longitudinal study
Last month I explored our longitudinal study to gather answers related to a few communities of interest we were evaluating. This month I discussed a few strategies to review and analyze all answers of all communities with Sage. We agreed that:
- The most telling aspect of an answer is often what a former intern didn’t say about their internship, their mentors or their community.
- We should also keep in mind the history of Outreachy itself, and read and analyze all answers considering that context.
Reading those answers takes quite a while, and it’s often a very exhausting task. With a bit of automation magic I was able to convert the .csv file to a .txt that structures all answers in a more readable format, but I always double check to make sure no important info is left behind. I had hopes it would make an impact on the way we organize things in our next round, but a more realistic timeline is delivering an in-depth report by September.
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Brazilian academic calendars
The December-March round is extremely popular with Brazilian students. With the pandemic suspending most of academic calendars in Brazil, Sage and I agreed to preemptively check the dates of all public Brazilian universities that had more than one candidate in the last December-March round to understand better what challenges we would face when defining the dates of the selection process and the internship itself. A surprising number of universities haven’t defined their policies quite yet, but all of our universities of interest published an official document stating at least the most important dates related to all 2020 terms (start and end dates).
Reading interviews and news, I expect this pandemic to impact all academic calendars in the world for at least two years (or four rounds).
Policy for students from the Federal University of Goiás
I was invited by an Instituto de Informática professor to participate in the talks of creating a hackerspace in the Federal University of Goiás. We discussed the possibility of creating some kind of policy within the hackerspace that would possibly allow Federal University of Goiás students to use their Outreachy hours as credits or even as mandatory internship hours.
The use of Outreachy hours to comply to mandatory internship hours is quite controversial as Brazilian law has a really strict definition of what truly counts as an internship — in my conversations with FIEG last year, they told me that nationwide promotion of the program should frame it as a “paid mentorship” rather than a “paid internship”. This particular professor, however, has managed to create a few policies (at first with elective classes) to help students use Google Summer of Code hours as academic credits, and he agreed that a hackerspace may be able to provide the structure we need to help students validate their hours.
I believe this particular initiative has more chances to thrive than my failed attempt at creating a federal policy as I have much more leverage as an undergraduate student at my university than I had with an external organization such as FIEG.