Outreachy report #18: February 2021
This morning we had our last intern chat with the December to March cohort. This one feels special: it’s the first cohort in which interns explicitly recognize me as an Outreachy organizer.
Internet censorship guide
One of our interns reported a case of internet censorship in their country that prevented them from working on their project. After some discussion we decided to write a guide of our own to help interns evaluate whether circumventing such censorship would be a good idea.
Reading about internet censorship is a rabbit hole – and the more I read, the more I realized it wasn’t an issue we could deal with lightly: publishing such guide on a public page could lead our website to be banned in certain countries or used by other people as a way to find additional resources. If possible, avoiding the attention of authorities would help interns communicate with us through Zulip or our own website.
A documentarian from Access Now kindly replied to an email of mine with a list of resources and advice to give interns if they face internet censorship. I plan to add such resources to the guide I was writing as soon as app review period ends.
Post-internship mentor interviews
As the December to March cohort finishes their internships I started making preparations to my post-internship interviews with mentors. I’ve drafted a few questions and decided to email them to every mentor instead of offering either a video call, a Zulip chat or an email interview since it makes it easier to save their answers and to give them all the time they need to describe their experiences. All emails will be sent this Friday.
Staff actions
I’m slowly learning how to use more and more staff actions on the Outreachy website. This month I was introduced to the actual administration panel and now have access to a limited number of resources. I have limited my actions to adding myself to the informal career chat page, rejecting applications as I review them and modifying school term dates after double checking them on a student’s university website.
Reviewing apps
Reviewing applications has become faster now that I don’t need to assign every application to Sage. I’m still struggling, however, with how to use school information displayed on our screens efficiently. Here’s a few issues I’ve been facing/thinking about:
- Sometimes students from the same school are automatically rejected because they submitted the wrong dates by accident. This isn’t disclosed in the current UI.
- The way school term info is displayed makes it a bit difficult to read when a student marks a term as their last.
- The “Essay qualities” page doesn’t disclose which application will receive such data in the title of the tab you’re working on. I’ve accidentally checked a few boxes on the wrong application because of this.
I put a pause in everything I was doing to help with application review efforts. Once again, as the soon as app review period is over I’ll open a few GitHub issues to discuss the UI and UX of our application review screens.