Outreachy report #43: March 2023
I’m writing this report in my hotel room in Brasília—I’m at the final stages of the proceedings to get a B1/B2 US visa so I can attend FOSSY. Brasília is the nearest city with an US embassy, so I had to travel 3h30min by car from Goiânia. Here, I have two visa-related appointments. One was yesterday, at CASV–they collected my fingerprints and took my photo to be added to my visa. The last one, on Monday, will be my consular interview. I should know whether I’ll be able to travel to the US by the end of Monday morning.
I didn’t hire any specialized services to help me with the whole process; I just made sure to follow the instructions on the US embassy website and talked to friends and acquaintances who went through the visa application. I filled out my DS-160 form in November 2022 and was lucky to find appointments in March and April 2023, just in time to be able to plan a trip to Portland.
I had to gather invitation letters, contracts, my company and university documents, proof I’ve been to another country in the last 5 years, bank statements, and so on. They will be used at my consular interview to prove my intention of visiting the US and returning to my home country; my roots, family, studies and all, are in Brazil.
In other news, we finished reviewing initial applications by the beginning of the month; we were overwhelmed by the amount of initial applications we received, so for the first time in a couple of years we weren’t able to review them all. This increase in interest in the program is, in a way, concerning—we don’t have enough communities, coordinators, mentors, and other volunteers to make sure every single approved applicant has a good chance to be selected. Some communities have to close their projects for new applicants earlier in the contribution process due to the overwhelming amount of applicants while others need help seeking more applicants… And we have more new communities coming in every semester that need onboarding and assistance during their first cohort with the program.
This has led us to start looking for another organizer–someone that would focus on our relationship with communities, mentors, and coordinators. We started by contacting two of our top picks in our previous hiring process to see if they’d be interested in applying again–and both of them said yes! Omotola and Sage are in charge of interviewing them while I’m away.
We finished reviewing the fourth and last feedback cycle. We had one termination, and a couple of extension requests we turned down. We had one mentor who expressed some insecurities about their mentorship style.
On the contribution period front, we had some reports of use of AI in pull requests. It looks like it’s becoming a problem over Google Summer of Code, too; it’s getting to a point we may have to write guidelines for mentors and coordinators on how to approach situations like that.
Finally, I’m preparing to travel to Argentina in two weeks to attend a CZI event. I proposed one project on supporting open science communities in mentorship programs and met some attendees on Slack. The list of invitees has some familiar faces, including Outreachy collaborators; I’m sure we’ll have very productive conversations in Buenos Aires. I’m proud and grateful to part of such a brilliant group of people, and I hope to bring some good insight from the Latin American open science community when I’m back.