Hello, folks. Good morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome to the Outreachy
Talk and Celebration of 1000 Interns. So before we start, I just want to see a show of hands
has anyone participated as an Outreachy mentor, a coordinator, an intern before? Woohoo! Thank
you for coming. And for folks who haven't heard about Outreachy before, Outreachy is an internship
program that provides internships in free and open source and open science internships.
And our internships are open to people who are subject to systemic bias, discrimination,
and impacted by underrepresentation in the technology industry of their country. Outreachy
is truly remote all around the world. We have mentors are remote, interns are remote, we
have interns on all the different livable continents, not Antarctica yet, but maybe
soon. And the interns are paid $7,000 total for the internship stipend. And that's a three-month
internship. We run internships twice a year, May to August, and December to March. And as of our
most current cohort, December 2023, we have had 1097 internships. And to celebrate that 1000
interns, we had a bunch of celebrations. Awesome. Okay, so we celebrated milestone in six
countries. We had the celebration in Cameroon, in India, Nigeria, Kenya, and of course in USDSE. And
this celebration is awesome because we had past interns. I mean, folks who have gone through this
program, they were able to like organize, they led the celebration, and they made everybody to feel
included across the celebration. Aside the six countries that we celebrated, we also had the
celebration virtually. We had three sessions, and it was really awesome. I also want to talk a
little bit about our accomplishments. Not only do we have 1000 interns, we have a 96% internship
completion rate. And that's part of because our internships, we consider more of a fellowship. We
want to make sure that the interns complete the internship. If they get sick, if they, you know,
have family issues, we extend the internship. And so we want to make sure that this is more about
them learning about free software and open science than trying to get a particular project done.
And we not only have this great completion rate, we also retain people in free software as well.
So 80% of past interns continue to contribute to free software, and 44% of those interns are
employed to contribute to free software as part of their job. So we want to talk about a little bit
about how did we get here? How did we get to 1000 outreach interns? As we talk about how did we get
here, you're probably wondering who we are. So let us introduce ourselves. My name is Karen Sandler.
I am a co-founder of Outreachy. I'm the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, which is
the home of Outreachy. I'm from Brazil, came here from a trip of 11,000 kilometers. It took me a
while to get here. I was a past intern when we came here, and I'm the current information and
process architect of Outreachy. Awesome. And I'm Omotala Eunice Omotayo. I'm from the giants of
Africa, Nigeria, and I'm the community manager at Outreachy. Hi, I'm Sage Sharp. I use Dave M pronouns
and I have one of the Outreachy organizers from USA. So we're going to go back to Outreachy history.
Oh, right. Before I can tell you, I'm going to just quickly introduce why I wanted to help
co-found Outreachy. I have a heart condition. I literally have a big heart. I used to think it
was very rare, but it's actually quite common. I'm at a high risk of suddenly dying, and so I have a
pacemaker defibrillator implanted in my body. I can't see the source code in my own body, and I was
shocked unnecessarily once while I was pregnant, actually more than once, while pregnant because
my heart was doing what a normal pregnant woman's heart does, but my defibrillator thought I was in
distress. The only way to stop it was to take drugs to slow my heart rate down. And this made me realize
that our technology may not be made for us despite the best intentions, and what are we going to do
when that happens? And so I became really passionate about software freedom and learning about,
like, as I've lived with this heart condition and I've participated in the free and open source
software communities, it's become very clear that our software can never be made for everyone,
unless it's made by everyone, unless everybody has a chance to contribute. And so this is where I
sort of entered the role as I found out about my heart condition and started speaking about it.
I became the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where I met a woman named Marina
Zurahinskaya. So this is a picture of Marina, this is me, ages ago, presenting the award to Marina.
So Marina was a GNOME shell developer, and she was very involved in the GNOME community. And when
the GNOME board evaluated their applications to Google Summer of Code, they noticed that
out of 181 applicants, none appeared to be women, and they realized that there was a problem.
And so the GNOME board eventually brought Marina in and said, what should we do about this? And Marina
wanted to start a program to help address this issue. And so she looked back, and in 2006,
the GNOME board had decided to do a summer outreach program, which they did a few internships,
and it was a one-off thing. It was successful, the interns finished their internships, but none
of those interns continued with the GNOME project, and it was just kind of left behind. And so Marina
decided to reinvigorate that program. She is not on stage now, you're probably wondering. She's not
on stage because she died of breast cancer last year, which is really tragic, but she leaves
this amazing legacy that she created of outreach, and I'm so excited to be able to tell her story to
you. And so in the 2009 guatech, there were so few women attendees that the GNOME board and Marina
decided that this was the moment that we were going to pick this up and we were going to create
this internship program. Raise your hand if you were at that desktop summit in 2009. Nobody!
That's great! I'm so excited to tell you about it. No, it was a really interesting experience,
and so the GNOME board went back with Marina and we decided to launch a new internship program,
and Marina very thoughtfully tried to say, what are all of the ways that women are not participating
in free and open-source software? Why don't they get started? And she systematically tried to address
those issues, connecting interns with mentors and helping them make their first contribution. And so
in 2010, the first outreach round, so this is the beginning of what we considered to be
outreachy, and for a while we did the first round, the second round, and then we started using the
months and years, because saying that you were part of the 13th round or the 15th round didn't
make a lot of sense. So we started with that. If we could just go back to that previous slide.
So if you notice, this program at the time was for women, and so you see we have this logo
of this karate lady sticking her foot out, kicking forward. I love this picture, but it's very much
of how the program started, very, very gendered. It was open to anyone who identified as a woman,
and the program had interns, and it was a really amazing cohort for the next one. So in 2010,
we had eight interns, and then you can see all these pictures that were of the interns at the
different guatechs in the coming years. And so a community was starting to be formed, and one of
the things that Marina did was she created meetups so that people could meet each other before a
conference so that you could walk in there and know that you would have the confidence of knowing
you had met someone before you entered it. So as RIT progressed, the internships again
continued to be all with GNOME, and I was executive director of the GNOME Foundation,
and the internships were so successful. The interns that came through the program
were core contributors to GNOME. We had the GNOME planet, and so the interns would be blogging on
the planet, and we would see their avatars, and people would come to Guantanamo and they would
become so connected, and we realized that this was a program that really needed to expand beyond
the GNOME project. And so I started talking with my friend Bradley Kuhn, who was the executive
director of Software Freedom Conservancy. Now he works with me at Software Freedom Conservancy still,
and Marina connected to Jessica McHeller of the Twisted Project, and Twisted was a Software
Freedom Conservancy member project, and so we decided to do experiment and see if we could
expand the internship beyond GNOME, and so we did, and it was hugely successful, and so we went
from there and offered it to connect it to a lot of other member projects. So now today we tend to
have 35 to 40 different free software communities and open science communities participating in
each cohort. Yeah, we used to have a slide where we put all of the communities on it, but it just
became too difficult to read. Yeah, so as Karen mentioned, originally in 2010, our criteria for
who could participate in the internships was anyone who identified as a woman, and then in 2013
we decided to expand that to make it more trans and queer inclusive, and we said the internships
are open to women, both cis and trans, trans men, and gender queer people as well. I think in 2014
or around around that time, we also started expanding tech companies published a lot of their
data about their employees, and so we realized that in the United States we were able to expand to
people of color who were underrepresented in the US tech industry, and I launched this effort to
kind of try to expand outreach to country by country. I was talking to lawyers in France and
lawyers in Australia, and we were starting to like figure out a way to expand place by place,
and it was a lot of work and very difficult, and you know free software is global, and outreach
participants were always global, the mentors and the interns, and it really didn't make a lot of
sense to try to do that. Yeah, so instead of country by country, the internship criteria we have now
is anyone who faces underrepresentation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the tech industry of
their country. Now, how do we determine that? We've come up with a series of essay questions that we
ask applicants, which is, you know, tell us which country are you going to live in during the
internship? How are you underrepresented in that country? How has your learning environment been?
Did you see people, you know, the last slide, the last talk, talked about role models. Did you see
few role models who looked like you, who represented your identity and background, and then we talked
about, you know, what systemic bias or discrimination have you faced both in while you're building your
skills and if you were to apply for a job in the industry of your country, and so these essays over
time we found ways to evaluate them in a global scale while still being, having, allowing people
to talk about their experiences at a local level. I love this because we don't decide what it means
to be discriminated. We don't decide what counts as discrimination. We don't, like, have a list of
anyone who is subject to systemic bias. We don't have classes of people. We let people tell us
about their own experiences and because we don't presume to understand every single experience
of systemic bias, discrimination, and underrepresentation. So then we get into sort of middle history.
Well, can I do one more ancient history? Because it's so exciting here at Bosnium. I was on this
very stage in 2014 when I announced that Outreachy was coming to, well, it was rebranding, Outreach
Program for Women was rebranding to Outreachy because it was no longer just for women, and we
also announced that it was coming to Software Freedom Conservancy. The project outgrew the
Gnome Foundation. You know, there were still only a handful of Gnome interns and the rest of the
internships were with the Linux kernel and Wikimedia and Mozilla and a ton of other communities.
And so the Gnome board and Software Freedom Conservancy and the Outreachy team all got
together and we moved the program over to Software Freedom Conservancy where it remains today.
So I got involved as part of Outreachy and I think it was was it 2014 or 2015?
One of the two. I think 2014. I think 2014. Yeah. As the Linux kernel coordinator. So I originally
helped find mentors in the Linux kernel. I connected them to Outreachy, got them prepared to
help applicants during the contribution period. And then in 2016, I stepped up to become part of
the actual Outreachy organizer team and passed off the Linux kernel coordinator position to someone
else. So in 2015, we have opened up our program and said, hey, let's write these essays about
the discrimination and bias that we face. We started having issues with reviewing those because we
started to get thousands and thousands of initial applications and also a lot more communities involved
too. So in 2017, I sat down with my spouse, Jamie, and he helped me understand a little bit of Django
and we built Outreachy, a Django based website where mentors could sign up, where applicants
could sign up and it really fits the the customness and fit what our our program was. And so big shout
out to Django and Python and that wonderful community. And I want to say, like, this is a
reflection of, you know, I talked a little bit about Marina and how she founded the program.
One of the things that is the most impressive part of her legacy is that she built up this program,
but then Sage came on board and she worked with them and she was able to transfer that knowledge
and create a program that was robust and that could could exist without her. And so we're here on
stage with this project that Marina really started with her personal passion, but that she thought
about how it would continue without her. And so Sage coming on was this absolutely essential
and then bringing all of this maturing the program. Yes, and I would say my role has been how do we
scale. This is how do we scale. And so the next part was we really need to it to just be more than
me and Karen at this point. And so we brought on Anna. My story about Alt Ritchie starts in early
2017. I heard about Alt Ritchie from an Alt Ritchie intern working with Mozilla, she gave a talk, a
lighting talk at a women technology conference in my city. And at the time I had the so crushing
realization as these mechanical engineering major that as a partially sided person, I wouldn't be able
to find a job in my state and when country, I had too many obstacles to face and to overcome.
So I applied to the December 2017 cohort was accepted in my first try. And I had a really
good experience in my internship. I had mentors who believed in me. And if you're seeing these,
Beno and Johan, thank you. And the community was happy to have me as a member. It was a really
transformative experience as one who faced ableism all my life. I had people who believed in me in
my potential and didn't question whether I was capable or not of doing my job. And when you were
switching careers through a program like this, you will experience something that's called a liminal
moment. You are not the person who you were before it started and you are still not the person you
were about to become. You are in between states. It's disorienting and scary. And you have to find
yourself again at the end of the program. And that can be a really difficult task. Interestingly,
when I joined Outreachy, Outreachy itself was facing a liminal moment. Things were changing. And
we asked ourselves, what is Outreachy exactly? I remember when we created a Zulip server and we
started connecting with interns by running bi-weekly intern chats about career in free and open source
software conferences, et cetera. Interns were no longer experiencing their internship in isolation.
And they were connecting to each other without depending on proprietary software or proprietary
social media. That was when something clicked. What was once something more of a liminal online
space where people would just go through with an adjacent community, it became a communal space.
And with a communal space comes coexistence, the need of permanence and a sense of belonging.
With a thriving community comes management's challenges that were beyond our capacity. At
that time, we were just too few. And we published a call for a community manager.
And I will say that before we posted the call for community manager, we tried to scale by
improving our documentation. We said, okay, if we can't answer everyone's questions, if we can't
answer all the applicants' questions, especially with so many, could we scale our documentation?
And that worked for a while. But eventually, we said, no, we really need an actual person that can
help us. Present day, yeah. So we can... So we're going back. What would you like to do?
We can continue. All right. So present day, one of the things too is as we expanded,
we really need to make sure that we could find additional funding.
Right. So I want to... I do want to start by saying,
Outreach was originally funded by corporate sponsorship, which was great. I definitely want
to give a shout out to Google, which is the company that sponsored the first... Like all the
first rounds and every round since then is the only company that has sponsored every single round
of Outreach. Plus, they gave us a lot of help. The program is modeled in part after Google Summer
of Code. And the Google staff has always been very supportive and helpful and has given us
the information and assistance throughout. And I really also want to give a huge shout out to
Red Hat because Marina worked at Red Hat and Red Hat contributed her time. It's safe to say that
there would be no Outreach-y without Red Hat's contributions early and then continuing in those
years after. But nonetheless, the program is not... We deeply appreciate our corporate sponsorships,
but it is very tough on the program to have to continue to get corporate sponsorships and then
to be responsive to the interests that a lot of companies have and want to put on internships
that they're funding. And so in this period, we shifted a lot more to grant funding to supplement
the corporate sponsorship. And that was really transformative to the program because we were
able to plan a little bit more long term and Ford Foundation, ARDC and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
were the foundations that came in. I would like to say if any of you work at a company that
want to sponsor Outreach-y, definitely get in touch. We really can use the support. We also
have some individual funding support. And having that mix of funding is really important to be able
to have the internships that we want to have. And honestly, being able to say no without having to
think twice to a company that wants us to have an internship that's too tightly tied to one company,
we're not going to do it. Having an internship that is not going to be a good experience for an
intern, we're not going to do it. And having all that... Having this independent funding,
we would have said no before, but it's even easy. It's very possible and easy to do it.
And one of the interesting things that comes from grant funding is that we can decide, hey,
there might be some initiatives that really need our support. And so one of the things that we did
in 2020 was we started funding humanitarian free software. And so this is things like public lab
that did citizen science and... Mobile lab. Mobile lab as well, which is a open science
hacker space and biomedical research. All peer. Yes. All kinds of interesting things.
And so these are projects that don't necessarily have enough funding on their own
to support an intern. But because we were able to get grant funding, we could offer
both funding for humanitarian open science... open source, and then eventually we moved to funding
open science as well. So again, citizen science, scientific research, we had outreach projects
that were actually looking at COVID at trying to estimate what was the hospital capacity with COVID.
And so it was really a proud moment to be able to fund that kind of research. And then in 2022,
we had our lovely community manager come in. Okay. So a little bit about where I was coming from.
I have past experience working with marginalized population, supporting them, especially when
it comes to their rights, when it comes to them receiving the rights supports that they need.
And I also have past experience empowering people into tech through Sheikot Africa,
coming up with programs, supporting them and standing in gap as an intermediary between them
and also the organization. Then coming into R3C as a community manager, I now stand as an
intermediary between the R3C applicants and the R3C community and the program itself.
So I was veered the R3C social media platforms, supporting and also responding to R3C applicants,
putting out contents that made the applicants, people who were interested in what R3C is doing,
understand what R3C stands for. And also I was able to come up with coffee charts. So via
R3C platforms as well, we were able to have real conversation, real life conversation,
helping R3C applicants to understand the R3C program better and also bringing past
interns, mentors, community coordinators to answer questions that the applicants have and also to
share their experience through the R3C program. And I've also been able to create more awareness
about the R3C program through attending and speaking at various conferences. This has really
been awesome. Especially at different conferences, I was able to empower people, tell them about the
R3C program and that has created a very good awareness about the program. And also this,
I would say, has created a very good and resounding application. We have a big growth about R3C
applicants from especially the African perspective, right? People coming not just to participate and
also to give back to R3C. As you can see, we have zero interns from the African perspective at
2010. And as at the December 23 course, we have over 44 African interns. So which means,
so this way, folks from the African perspective now understand better that there's a space for them
in the open source ecosystem. They are coming into this program to contribute and to improve
open source and open science projects and also to give back to the R3C and the open source ecosystem
in general. I want to say that before we had a solid program, an amazing program, but you gave it
a voice, you gave it faces, the recognition it deserves. Thank you. And I'm grateful for that.
Thank you so much. I would also like to add that since I joined the R3C program,
folks have been, especially the applicants, they now understand the different parts of open
source that they can contribute to, especially the fact that it's not just about the code part.
They don't have to come into open source to maybe be a programmer. They can come into it to
contribute and to give back in various perspective documentation, even event planning, community
management, and so on and so forth. And also that because to the new R3C organizer. Yeah,
we talked about a sense of belonging that comes with finding a community. Another thing that
comes up often is this desire to give back. You offer a great opportunity. You want others to
have access to similar opportunities that has happened to me. This is why I joined the outreach
team back in 2018. We found that many interns come back as mentors, some as new mentors,
some as experienced mentors. Either way, challenging situations require extensive support.
And we decided that we needed someone dedicated to supporting and advocating for our mentors. Yes.
After Omotolo's outstanding year of supporting applicants and interns, we hired Hilda Udufu.
She is someone who has extensive experience with the program. She was an intern. She was a mentor.
She was a coordinator all of it for public lab. And I'm proud to say that in turn I've become her
mentor when she joined team. She's been facilitating conversations with mentors in office hours,
having interviews with them so we can highlight their work, working hard and facilitating relationships
between mentors and interns. And I think all of it is an indication of a phase of
maturity within the program. We are not only looking for always growing. We are looking for
growing sustainably and keeping our community flourishing. And I also love to add that Sage
and Karen has mentioned how Astrochi has grown from, I mean the background of Astrochi and the
growth so far. And with this we can also point out how Astrochi has grown in the aspect of not
just why should we have Astrochi, but now to better support the applicants I come in as a
community manager, right? And also we have Tilda. So Astrochi is not just supporting applicants,
we are also supporting mentors. So because we understand that the program is not just about
interns coming to contribute to open source, the program is also about people staying back in
open source and also working together to give back to open source ecosystem. Yes, this is about
open source sustainability as a whole, like the ability of us continually to exist as a community,
supporting contributions and making sure that software still exists and still maintained.
And I would say that you know you can look at the numbers of the people who find jobs
that are contributing to free and open source software and the number of people who continue
to contribute, but no matter where our interns go after that they always take the values of
software freedom with them and they're exposed to software freedom and they take those values and
they there's a follow-on effect from these internships. And I would say our interns have
won awards, they've joined boards of directors, they've been mentors, grand mentors, great grand
mentors and we see graduates of Outreachy everywhere. All right, so then the question becomes
what's next for Outreachy? What is the future Outreachy? And the future of Outreachy maybe it's
you. Maybe you would like to mentor, maybe you would like to coordinate. If you'd like to know
more about Outreachy you can come and ask questions, but also there's a bough in
AW121 at 1300 or 1pm and if you'd like to come talk with us, figure out how to get involved,
we would love to hear you, we would love to hear what you're doing in free software and
come connect with us. If you're interested in being signing up as a free software community,
the deadline to sign up as a community is February 15th, so please do check out our call
for mentors and communities. This is a celebration, you know, we're celebrating the fact that we got
to this point and we can only do it with you really. We are actually gated generally by the
number of mentors that we can find, so we we shield for funding already, but realistically most of
the time it's finding enough mentors to provide those internships and so you know really that's
that's all of you who are here, you're you're you know enough to be here. Actually raise your hand
if you're here and it's your first FOSDEM. Wow so it's like it's like a third of the room, that's
great. So yeah you know I think one of the things that I'm most proud about Outreachy is that it's
a real grassroots program, like it's something that we started by offering something really
pragmatic, like just offer internships, have that work pair interns with mentors and have them learn
and then we've just been growing it slowly. I remember when when we started back in the day
and I was a new executive director there were a lot of diversity initiatives coming up at the time,
it was like very fashionable to start diversity initiatives and there were like programs getting
millions of dollars based on glossy work you know glossy brochures that they had made
having not done anything in the past, but we found it Outreachy with the different mentality with the
with the bottom up free and open source software mentality of we're going to do the work and then
if people find it valuable then the resources, the time and the money will come after and so
we can't you know it's Outreachy is our thousands of volunteers and I'm proud that it is itself a
free software project. And also we want to like tell folks that are listening to us that you can
support Outreachy in several ways. You can go back to your local communities to tell the story of
Outreachy to become an advocate of Outreachy. Tell folks who can be part of Outreachy as an
intent to apply to the Outreachy program. You can also contribute to Outreachy right through your
various communities, your various projects by bringing your projects as I mean your community,
you can be a mentor, you can come in as a community coordinator right and you can also
support Outreachy by going back to create more awareness about the Outreachy program. So tell
folks about Outreachy, you tell your communities about Outreachy, bring your projects to Outreachy
and you can also partner with Outreachy in various ways. So you can reach out to us if you want and
connect with us right. We have you can connect with us later today to ask us questions, discuss
ways, several ways that you can contribute to Outreachy. Additionally, we may not have the
capacity to work as a mentor, but you may have the capacity of reviewing pull requests, of
reviewing contributions made by the applicants. Communities need it so much, they get so overwhelmed
with our applicants and they will be great help if we could help them. Yeah, even if you have
experience with any particular community that's involved with Outreachy going to help out and
answer questions in the community chat, that is a great way to help those communities.
Questions? No, we're going to the thank yous because there's a lot here. Yeah, so I don't know if we...
I don't think we want to read all the thank yous. No, we're not going to. I want to highlight a few
people though. I definitely want to... We've already talked about the organizers and the reviewers
and all of our volunteers. I definitely need to... We always joke that Outreachy is like a
python swallowing a goat. There is so much logistical work to be done to manage Outreachy.
It is huge and so we want to thank the Conservancy Accounting and Logistical
and Financial staff including Bradley and Roseanne. And also...
They're amazing.
And I also really want to thank Roseanna who is on the... It says Gnome Board. Oh, and the Gnome Board.
Right, Roseanna who did that logistical work at Gnome and helped launch the program. We want to
thank the Gnome Board because there were times when running a program like this is difficult.
It's a lot. Yeah, and we've had our times where there's been misinformation and people attacking
the work that we do beyond calling us names and threatening us. And it's been really stressful.
And the Gnome Board spent a lot of time making sure that they were defending the program and
supporting it. And then I also want to applaud them for realizing that it had outgrown the Gnome
community and that it made sense to move it to another organization. The Outreachy leadership in
the past, Cindy Polaris and also Tony Sebro who is now on SFC's board and was our general council
and is still involved with Outreachy. Justin Colonino who has given us pro bono legal help
actually from Outreachy's inception has been supporting us with legal work. Ropes and Gray
who gives us pro bono legal work, Otter Tech and also Owen Taylor and Jamie Sharp.
I did read most of them, I'm sorry. But they deserve it.
All right, so.
So we can take some questions if anyone has any questions.
All the microphones so we have to share one here.
It is so hard to hear in this room, so you have to speak really loud.
Okay, first of all, a huge big thank you. It's hard to overstate the value of what you do.
And because it is so valuable, my question is, so in the end you kind of dodged the topic a bit
about the future. So my question would be, since it's so valuable, how can you transcend from an
organization that depends like so many others on the efforts of some individuals for survival
into something that is actually hard to stop, that has a life on its own that you couldn't
shut down if you wanted to.
Is that for me? Yeah, that's you.
I mean, they're pointing at me to answer that question, which you know, I'm executive director,
so I have to like be the visionary of this program, you know, like, and give that voice.
But I do have an answer after you.
But Sage will have the answer. No, I mean, I think that the whole point of it being a grassroots,
like free and open source software project is that we grow sustainably, we grow slowly,
and we grow carefully. We bring stability. We've been working for the last five years on redundancy,
so making sure that we have a team that isn't going to completely burn out.
It's so much work to do this program. I don't know how Marina did all of those logistics.
She basically did them herself for a really long time, and she maintained all of these wiki pages
where she wrote down the names of, she just stayed in touch with every outreach intern
and like wrote down where they went to work because she ran into them in a, you know, in the hallway.
So like what we've done is with Anna's help and Sage's help, and now what Matola's told us
is to make that a lot more systematic. So we've got a robustness so that if any one of us is no
longer part of the program, it has a life of its own. I think too, to bring in some of the values
of free software, what we have done in Outreachy is we have talked to different communities and
learned what are the best practices for being inclusive, for onboarding new members,
for designing projects for interns, and we've documented that. So if you look at the Outreachy
documentation for mentors and communities, there's a lot there of knowledge that we have learned
that was siloed across different communities. And so even if Outreachy goes, I think we still have
impact on those communities. Our documentation, our knowledge sharing, the lessons we've learned
will move on. And so I think in the future, we'd like to be a little more vocal about why we design
the program specific ways, how we be more inclusive and coach our communities on that.
And I think too that the grant funding companies that want to fund the Outreachy General Fund rather
than specific internships is going to be the way forward. So we keep pushing our sponsors
towards that and hoping that they'll allow us to make sure that our team continues and also that
we can decide which communities have the strongest interns and allocate funding that way.
We have a dream of having an open mentorship alliance with other mentorship programs. We know
we are not the only ones and there are many, many more that do things differently, but they are as
important and as fundamental to the open source system. I would also say that like historically,
we have improved something about Outreachy every single round. Like the idea is that the whole
point of like free and open source software is that no one and nothing is perfect, right? And so
we've been changing something every round. If you have feedback for us about things that could be
made better, we would love to hear it because we're looking at it ourselves and so we expect to
change and improve. I was also going to add to that, but it's also really nice to see all four of
you on stage and also the diversity of the organizer group as well as really I think a special part
of this, but my question is kind of actually building on what you Anna said about the mentoring
side. So I'm definitely seeing a challenge in a lot of open source communities and projects around
that mentoring side. General on how do you do mentoring and how do you scale mentoring in a
community? So my question is like from your perspective and doing all of this kind of working
so closely with projects and working with mentors, what are the greatest challenges that you see around
mentoring and mentorship and open source? And do you have all the answers? No, do you have any ideas
or tips about what you think the open source movement needs today to grow and scale mentoring?
I can think of some like cultural differences, the way you talk to someone in Brazil may be
different from the way someone talks to another in the United States or in Nigeria. So conciliating
those differences when you are doing asynchronous communication, for example, you can create a
lot of conflict with some. Another one is safeguarding. This is something that some mentors have told me,
especially when we work with more marginalized communities. It's difficult to ensure, it can be
challenging to ensure that everyone is in a safe environment. We had some folks that had some really
challenging lives at home and needed safeguarding. And that can be a difficult situation, both for
the mentor and the intern. So having the psychological support for both of them is important and also
challenging. And I think as well for mentors, I think having a pathway to mentorship is important.
I think a lot of people assume, hey, I have to be a maintainer for five years to be a mentor.
And so finding ways to define a path towards mentorship that doesn't feel like you have to be
an absolute expert. So one of the things we've been trying to do in our outreach chats is talk about
what does mentoring mean? How do you get to be a mentor and emphasize you don't have to know
everything? And so with Outreachy, what we've done is we've encouraged people to co-mentor.
So you've got someone who is more experienced in the project and someone who has just been in
intern, either Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and they shadow the mentor. They're starting
helping out. We're training mentors. And so figuring out how to create those pathways is going to help.
It's difficult to aspire to be something if you don't even know that is a possibility to be that
something. And also to add to what Sej just mentioned, the Outreachy organizers, especially the mentor
support, to that we have been able to come up with different initiatives to support mentors
from the contribution stage. We understand it's not easy from the contribution stage to
getting feedback at every point during the internship to our mentors office accession.
Because we want to understand the various challenges that the mentors face, we want to be able to
support them. Sometimes we also want mentors to come together through our coffee chats with mentors.
And even of his accession, we want mentors to be able to discuss with one another from different
communities to state the challenges they are facing, to learn from another mentor from another
community, how they've been able to address these challenges. That way, happy mentors learn from one
another. I would say also you commented on our diversity as organizers, but one of the strengths
of the program is recognizing that the burden of bringing diversity to free and open source software
shouldn't rely on the people who are underrepresented. And so,
and so, mentorship is a great way to be an ally, right? It's a great way to shift that burden.
And so, like, you know, I think that's when one of the strengths of the program over time is that
it's a great way to get folks that are not subject to systemic bias who are not underrepresented
to help bring people up. I think, do we, do we have time for one more question? Or are we?
We're done. We're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for supporting our
reach. Have a great bottom. Thank you.