Outreachy report: February 2026

Programmatic activities

• Our December 2025 cohort has come to an end. All 21 interns have successfully finished their internships. We received only one extension request towards the end of the internship, but it was an inconsequential 1-week extension we gadly accepted.
• Omotola Omotayo reported that her coffee chats were a success; interacting with interns by voice rather than text increased intern engagement and decreased the overall amount of 1:1 conversations.
• We received a total of 3,068 initial applications for our May 2026 cohort. 12 communities signed up to participate; 3 of them are new (Open Data Hub, F3D, The Rust Project). Unfortunately, only 2 of them have the means to fund their internships; both will participate in this cohort.

I continued to learn more about our website’s architecture. To my surprise, the logic behind several variables tied to important deadlines weren’t as straightforward as I expected; Sage Sharp’s decisions were based on years of experience handling the requests of community mentors and coordinators. For example, the dates for project submissions displayed on our Community CfP page and all blog posts is <deadline> - 7 days — a soft deadline. The hard deadline is shown only after communities request an extension — and that is set manually by organizers.

Another point of attention was how intertwined the website has been to Sage Sharp’s accounts; for example, blog posts are automatically published as authored by them. It occured to me that, in the development of our website, we didn’t fully prepare for successions. Therefore, part of my role in the maintenance of our infrastructure is finally making it more resilient by making it less reliable on a single person — decentralize knowledge and capacity.

Omotola Omotayo asked us to repurpose intern chat emails as notifications for the coffee chats; adapting that portion of the codebase will be an easy task. What concerns me, however, is the dependency of our website of Heroku, and its overall deployment strategy. My main mission for March and April is to prepare a new deployment strategy that can be shared between Paul Visscher, Tilda Udufo and me.

In their onboarding call with Tilda Udufo, The Rust Project mentioned that our current documentation is confusing and repetitive. One of my goals for the December 2026 cohort is to rework it completely; this aspect of our website has always dissastified me, and it’s about time we focus on it.

Open Mentorship Handbook

• I found myself reading more in order to write more; the highlight of my month was reading Gloria Dwomoh’s Master’s thesis and her companion article for IEEE Software, “Advancing more inclusive tech careers: How people develop their potential and thrive”.
• I started writing drafts of chapters about LLM usage in open source and challenges in reconciling cultural differences in a mentor-mentee relationship. The latter is the result of an interview we conducted at a listening session for our Open Mentorship Handbook in mid-February; the former, the result of several conversations I had with professors and some of my own mentors.
• I attended Lab Conf, a conference at Lab Livre in Brasília. I was introduced to Hadrien Froger from Octree and I spent the day with Carla Rocha, one of the founding members of the mentorship program Big Open Source Sibling.

To be a good writer is to be a good reader. I’ve been cataloguing academic literature about menntorships on Zotero (another awesome FOSS tool!), more notably Gloria Dwomoh’s body of work about Outreachy. Back in 2023, we assisted Gloria with her Master’s thesis; additionally, she published an article on IEEE Software as an abridged version of her findings.

Omotola Omotayo, Tilda Udufo and I hosted a listening session for our Open Mentorship Handbook. Only one mentor showed up, and I took that as an opportunity to interview her. We have an incredible chat about her experiences with mentorship (both as a mentee and as a mentor), and in particular about how to advise mentees on big decisions (e.g. attending university, immigration, accepting job offers) when both come from different cultural backgrounds. We had several conversations with mentors, applicants and interns caused by clashes in communication that ultimately boiled down to different cultural expressions; including that in the handbook seems sensible. However, that does require more attention and responsibility, so the writing process will be prolonged.

Something that helped me with my writer’s block was accepting that a flow of ideas may come disordered; wanting to write linearly for the sake of linearity killed a lot of my writing sessions. As our handbook contains several sections, it’s okay to write as inspiration comes. We’ll build something beautiful and complete once we finish writing every section and start organizing them.

Attending Lab Conf and supervising undergraduate students studying mentorship methodologies has brought me great inspiration too. When I met Hadrien Froger, I gained incredible insight on Decidim’s inner workings, especially their funding sources and governance structures (and struggles). And by spending the day with Carla Rocha, I reconnected with a successful program created by two Outreachy alums, learning more about challenges they’ve faced (e.g. difficulties in reaching certain demographics, receiving and managing funding). I came back with more energy than ever; now, all I need to do is to write.