[Outreachy reports] · April 5, 2022 · 2 min read

Outreachy report #31: March 2022

March was a tough month–my partner and I had dengue fever as we reviewed and processed initial applications–, but we made through it.

✨ Team highlights

Sage developed new code to help us review and process school time commitments: Sage and I have been trying to develop strategies to review academic calendars quickly for years. We’ve gone from external notes to trying to gathering data on specific schools and requesting initial application reviewers to assign students to us. This cohort, Sage developed a functionality called classmates: based on the URL students use to display their academic calendar, among other data, our website tell us who are applicant X’s possible classmates. This functionality allowed us to review all relevant applications fairly quickly. It saved us time and energy!
We reviewed and processed all initial applications for the May 2022 cohort: We had a wonderful team of initial application reviewers and we were able to review all applications in time for the contribution period. This is remarkable–we had an additional load of hundreds of applications due to the initial application deadline extension and I had to take some days off due to the hospitalization of my partner. I’m confident we’re in the right track to have smoother reviewing periods in the future.

Mentoring organization onboarding: We’ve learned that we need to get new communities onboarded sooner. We’re considering sending invites to onboarding sessions automatically when a new community signs up to a cohort in our website. We’re also planning on documenting mentor and coodinator actions throughout Outreachy cohorts to help communities set expectations for their participation.

Staff onboarding: We welcomed our new community manager last Friday. Their perspective has been helping us design better onboarding documentation. We should be ready to welcome staff members using any operating system and with vastly different levels of knowledge about the tools we use. We should test our instructions in different environments from time to time to see if they’re easy to follow and still produce the expected results.
Initial application reviewers onboarding: Our reviewers had many questions throughout the whole review period. Many of them weren’t covered by our current onboarding material. We need to update our onboarding documentation to document such questions and answers and to include new instructions related to all new functionalities we added to the website in the middle of the initial application review period.