Outreachy report #45: May 2023
We accepted 63 interns this cohort! They started their internship this week and we’ll host our first intern chat with them—about working remotely—today.
Intern selection and program rules
We have a set of processes we follow during the intern selection period to make sure all interns that coordinators and mentors have selected are still eligible. But as we accept more interns, a couple of them started to become so time consuming with such questionable returns we’ve been wondering if the core ideas behind those processes and rules still ring true. Have they been facilitating the participation of people in minoritized groups or preventing it, partially or altogether? Are they achieving the results we’ve been expecting? This made us toy with the idea of running one or two test cohort with modified rules, which, of course, would require approval from coordinators, mentors, and the PLC.
1,000 interns celebration
This cohort is also quite special: we just accepted our 1000th intern! Such a special occasion requires a special celebration, so we’re having eight of them! There will be seven celebrations across multiple locations around the world—Portland, Toronto, Lagos, Bamenda, Nairobi, Berlin, and Delhi—and one virtual. We’ve recruited event leads and volunteers from our community in the past month and started to coordinate with them. We also started to send an invitation form to past and current interns, mentors, and coordinators.
Sage and I are the event leads in Portland—we’ll host a celebration during FOSSY. We’ll start discussing specific details for this celebration this Wednesday.
FOSSY 2023
I’m also preparing for my trip to the US. Surpringly, the most time consuming and nerve wrecking part of this trip was not getting our US visas, but finding a good enough itinerary. Portland isn’t a popular destination for Brazilians. There are no direct flights from Guarulhos to Portland, which means we’d have to get at least 3 flights each way (GYN ➡️ GRU, GRU ➡️ some American city, some American city ➡️ PDX). The most popular connection airports were IAH, ORD, ATL, and DFW.
July is also peak tourism season for Brazilians traveling to the US. Flight tickets were cheaper on two occasions before we even got our US B1/B2 visas approved. The third price drop happened right around the time I told Sage to get me in touch with Pono so we could proceed with buying our tickets. I bought them myself last Saturday before another price increase wave.
There were also a couple of restrictions. Sage asked me to travel to Portland a couple days before FOSSY to help them with the last details of Outreachy’s 1,000 intern celebration. I’ll arrive 2 and a half days before FOSSY. As foreign citizens from Brazil traveling to the US for the first time, we couldn’t book flights with short layovers. Our Immigration and Customs queues are much longer than other approved countries or American citizens queues. On the other hand, longer layovers (7+ hours) would take precious hours away from this trip, so they weren’t considered.
Airfare was shockingly expensive. As I mentioned on Mastodon, so shockingly expensive it’s a perfect example of the gap between Global North and Global South.
I worked as a research assistant at a Brazilian research laboratory for 15 months between 2018 and 2019. I was involved with many Brazilian free software projects: Mapas Culturais, Tainacan, Humaniza SUS. One of them received 240k USD over three years. 85% of that money was spent towards paying almost 40 people (including me) from 2017 to 2019. At the time, I was paid a monthly stipend of 125 USD.
Airfare costs to FOSSY alone were 30 times more what I was paid monthly as a research assistant, two times more the amount I was paid over the 15 months I worked at this lab. It’s also equivalent to 21% of their approved travel budget for three years.
I have no doubt it will be worth it to travel to the US—I’ll finally get to meet the people I’ve been working with for almost 5 years. But such disparities are what motivated me to submit a talk proposal on FOSS and systems thinking to two different tracks. I’ve been passionate about systems thinking and systems theory for years; this talk has been brewing in my mind for a long time.
Being queer, disabled and from the Global South, I’ve found that navigating open science and free software communities is often difficult and frequently energy-consuming. I’m interacting with people 24/7/365 in a language that isn’t my native tongue; I have a hard time joining discussions with people from the Global North, especially when they’re about money; and I have to conciliate being a disabled person who needs proprietary software to survive with being a free software advocate, being frequently labeled as ‘hypocritical’ or ‘fraudster’ for not ‘fully committing’ to the free software cause.
So much of this can be explained and understood when we look at the free software movement from a systemic thinking POV. True transformation can only be achieved by understanding why and how principles, abstractions, models, concepts are built and enforced.