2020-11: Outreachy Progress

Summary

  • Conservancy announced Sage Sharp has been hired to work on Outreachy full-time
  • Outreachy announced that 54 interns were accepted for the December 2020 cohort
  • 650 applicants had their initial application approved and 255 applicants recorded a contribution
  • Outreachy confirmed 19 sponsors for interns in specific communities, and 7 sponsors for the Outreachy general fund for the December 2020 internship cohort
  • The Outreachy general fund sponsored 8 interns from communities like Intermine, Mixxx DJ Software, The Astropy Project, Public Lab, Tor Project, and Ushahidi

Admin

  • Planning long-term goals with Outreachy PLC
  • Review intern selections for ineligible interns
  • Meetings with Anna to discuss mentor interview goals and progress, and medium-term goals for December to March
  • Ramping up at Conservancy – receiving access to internal resources (like Outreachy invoice tracking in Conservancy’s RT), setting up insurance, payment, retirement, etc.

Sponsorship

  • Confirmed 7 sponsors for the Outreachy general fund
  • Confirmed 19 sponsors for interns in specific communities
  • Submitted a grant for 1 intern with a community
  • Created a generic sponsorship slide deck
  • Talked with 2 potential sponsors for the May 2020 round

Development

Most development efforts this month were related to making invoicing sponsors easier, or finding statistics to put into sponsor materials.

  • Python script to extract statistics from the November 2019 Outreachy longitudinal survey of alums
  • Created an Outreachy website page to show sponsorship information that community coordinators entered

Other development efforts were related to supporting Anna as they interview mentors to see how Outreachy can better support them:

  • Create Django shell code to find mentors who never mentored before

The Outreachy mentors have long complained that the mentor feedback form is confusing if you need to ask for an internship extension. Development effort was done this month to simplify the mentor feedback form.

Misc development:

  • Update the Outreachy website to Django to 3.1.2
  • Update the Outreachy private intern and mentor chat to Zulip 3.2

Documentation

Part of the development work this month was better supporting mentors who need to ask for an internship extension. As part of that work, I discovered that how Outreachy handles internship extensions is largely undocumented.

The mentor FAQ now specifies how Outreachy handles internship extensions.