Outreachy report #20: April 2021
Personal evaluation
Three factors affected my working hours this month:
- Recovering from initial application processing in March
- A few traumatic events in college
- Taking family members to vaccinate (I should be eligible in a few weeks!)
I’ve described how Factor #1 affected me in last month’s report. Factor #2 delayed my recovery for a few more weeks – I was forced to make some really difficult decisions about what actions I should take after a professor became increasingly hostile to me in class. Factor #3 is self-explanatory – every trip to the local vaccination spot would take a 4-5 hours, if I was lucky. Waiting time increased drastically once younger family members started to become eligible.
Sponsorship processing and modeling processes with BPMN
Sage and I come from similar academic backgrounds, but much of what I’ve been studying in Information Systems isn’t extensively taught in Engineering undergraduates. As a way to encourage connecting my current undergraduate to the work I do in Outreachy, I decided that at least once a month I will share something relevant to Outreachy I’ve learned in college during one of our 1:1 meetings.
This month I introduced Sage to the way Information Systems analysts use a tool called BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). As they were talking about sponsorship processing, we noticed that a textual or verbal description of this process was a little difficult to follow because this process involves more people and systems than just Sage and I and Outreachy’s own website – and that is, in fact, the type of process most fit for a tool like BPMN.
I taught them the most basic concepts – pools, swim lanes, events, activities, gateways – and we drafted an initial map of our sponsor processing flow together. This helped me get a clear overview of the process as previous descriptions sounded too convoluted to me, and helped us visualize the pitfalls of the whole process (for instance, where do we spend the most time). There are still some steps of processing sponsorships that feel quite intimidating such as emailing community coordinators and sponsors themselves, but Sage has been a great mentor and seems to know exactly what tasks I should take to help me increase my confidence.
End of the contribution period
We are finally moving to the intern selection phase. While I did help Sage with intern vetting in the previous round, this is the first time I’m completely involved in all steps that lead to the final intern list. We’ve agreed to switch places this round – I will take care of checking time commitments for the last time and they will be responsible for other checks.
I had to spend some hours in my own version of the Outreachy website to help applicants submit their final application and record their contributions. This might be one of the most confusing sections of our system (Sorry, Sage – I know you’re doing your best): it isn’t clear where you should go to record a contribution, and many of the labels on the buttons we use on those interfaces are confusing to applicants. I’d say this is a strong contender for a complete overhaul.