Outreachy report #16: December 2020
With finals and holidays, this month wasn’t as intense as others — in fact, I had to work reduced hours to take care of some personal affairs. I’m confident, however, 2021 will be a fantastic year for Outreachy.
Meeting our new interns
This month we saw interns joining Zulip one by one, exploring our streams and starting to socialize with each other. This cohort is especially excited about their blog posts, which they’ve been sharing on a dedicated #chat stream!
We hosted two intern chats this month: Intros and Q&A, and Everybody Struggles. The first one is usually a bit lukewarm, interns are still getting used to their new routine, tools, and the mentors they’ll be working with for the next three months. Everybody Struggles, on the other hand, is very popular – interns, mentors and organizers take this opportunity to open up about their hardships and help each other.
Mentors interviews report
Collecting data is “easy”, but taking a seat and reading logs of hours of interviews can be quite tiring. With Sage’s help, I highlighted every single piece of information most relevant to our long-term strategies: what’s the profile of the people I interviewed? What’s easy or difficult about becoming a mentor? What are the things Outreachy is doing right? What do we need to improve?
Looking back, I’m a bit disappointed I wasn’t able to interview former Outreachy interns this time. However, I was able to gather a lot of information on three specific gateways to Outreachy mentoring and how communities coordinate projects, which made me realize we shouldn’t be asking ourselves “What Outreachy should do to attract more mentors?” but “What Outreachy can do to support communities in their search for mentors?”.
Letters of participation
We’ve been getting a lot of requests for letters of participation — so many I’ve been mostly responding to newer requests and digging older requests to see which one is more urgent to rank them in priority. Sage and I discussed a way to automate this task directly on our system, but for now, this is not exactly a priority on the development front. Most requests involve situations related to employment and immigration.