Outreachy report #37: September 2022
Even though this is my 36th report, it marks four years of work with Outreachy. My birthday is also in just a couple of days! The program has been growing with me as much as I’ve been growing with it. Well, such a special occasion requires a special celebration, and I want to talk about my two goals for the next year.
Facilitating decision-making: Improving our relationship with data we collect and store
Sage has done a phenomenal work with understanding Outreachy’s progress through queries on Django Shell, and many of those queries facilitate our day-to-day work––for instance, we’re able to assign every single Brazilian student applicant to me so other initial application reviewers don’t need to deal with academic calendars in Portuguese, or manually assign those applications to me. Sage’s queries are based on a model of the website that’s based on Django’s models and objects. While this is an excellent approach to automate very specific tasks deeply tied to our website’s architecture, this solution gets increasingly complex when we talk about processing data in bulks and monitoring the state of the program as a whole.
This is where the concepts of data science and business intelligence come to our rescue. Data science can helps answer questions such as:
- On average, how many times a person has to apply to Outreachy to be selected as an intern?
- What are the skills required for projects candidates living in African countries apply to?
- How many interns become mentors and/or coordinators?
Those questions are good data science questions because they force us to think about some very complex relationships between all the data we collect and store. We can process and analyze it with the help of libraries such as pandas. This sort of data analysis could be done once, at the beginning of the year, or twice a year, before each cohort.
As for business intelligence, it can helps us build a dashboard that monitors trends about the program, such as:
- Is the amount of initial applications we receive each cohort growing linearly, exponentially?
- What are the days we see a peak in initial application submissions?
- How many new mentors sign up for Outreachy every cohort?
- From what countries we receive the most initial applications? What about mentors and coordinators?
- How many initial applications do we review per day, per week, per month?
Those questions can be answered with SQL queries and specific data visualization tools such as Apache Superset. Business intelligence dashboards are built to be used daily, sometimes hourly, throughout the year. A BI dashboard for Outreachy could be integrated into our website on the organizers dashboard. A role-specific dashboard could also be created for coordinators, helping them monitor the progress of their mentoring organization during a cohort and/or a given year.
Usefulness meets usability: Making our website experience more context and action-driven
Even though I’ve already touched the subject of revamping our homepage in my previous report, I want to provide more details about the kind of Human-Computer Intereaction analysis I’ve ran during my latest school term, and what I’m going to do from now on.
My final Human-Computer Interaction project consisted in designing or reimagining an interface with the help of HCI processes and theory. That included:
- Providing context about the system itself (technologies involved, goals, mission)
- Describing the scope of the project
- Identifying key people in the project/organization
- Evaluating the possible impact of the proposed changes (or lack of)
- Choosing a design process to follow
- Establishing what are our usability requirements and evaluating our current user experience
- Modeling the system through user profiles, personas, scenarios, use case and activity diagrams
- Prototyping a proposed solution
- Conducting an heuristic evaluation of someone else’s prototype
Due to time constraints and the size of our system and program, I could only provide a very simplified version of the items listed about. However, it still is a really good foundation to help me explore, propose, create and evaluate UX and UI solutions for our website. I plan on translating it into English, expanding it and introducing new design tools to our workflow so we can provide better usability in our systems. The first item on my list is importing my HCI prototype from Figma to Penpot, an open source alternative for prototyping.
Other things worth reporting
- 💪🏻 I onboarded three new potential mentoring organizations: IPFS, Open Life Science, and Brainstorm;
- ✨ I onboarded three new initial application reviewers through a new process using mock-ups of our actual interfaces;
- 💬 I had informal chats with three May 2022 alums;
- 📃 I provided 14 letters of participation;
- 📋 I participated in a Code of Conduct Enforcement training provided by Sage;
- 📚 So far, I’ll take two relevant courses for Outreachy this semester: Databases II and Information Systems Engineering II.