Anna e só
reports > Outreachy

Outreachy report: July 2025

Focal points

Program activities

Open Mentorship Handbook

Description of activities

I’m delighted to announce that we were awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to build and disseminate my Open Mentorship Handbook project. Additionally, I’m elated to announce that I was elected to serve a two-year term (2025-2027) at the Diversity & Inclusion in Scientific Computing (DISC) Committee with a platform to help existing DISC projects and keep developing the Open Mentorship Handbook with the support of NumFOCUS. Such achievement firmly establishes the Open Mentorship Handbook as a multi-stakeholder initiative.

The first public engagement around the Open Mentorship Handbook project took place at DISC Unconference 2025 back in March. I was blessed with the enthusiasm and participation of several leaders of projects sponsored by NumFOCUS. My goal is to reactivate and direct that incredible energy to the writing and editing of the product we envisioned together at DISC Unconference, and to ultimately disseminate it among NumFOCUS communities.

NumFOCUS has been extremely supportive of the Open Mentorship Handbook since it was first proposed in February. We’ve exchanged several messages brainstorming prospect funding sources, and we had a meeting in early July to discuss the similarities and the differences between the Open Mentorship Handbook project and more established projects such as the DISCOVER Cookbook.

The DISCOVER Cookbook has two ongoing internal projects of interest being developed under Google Summer of Code:

  1. The creation of a versioning system. The DISCOVER Cookbook has adopted a documentation as code approach for its editorial process. A docs as code strategy entails the adoption of the same practices and workflow as software development teams (e.g. usage of issue trackers, version control systems, code reviews). The DISCOVER Cookbook is created with Sphinx and published on GitHub Pages. This project seeks to leverage some of the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) features of GitHub such as GitHub Actions workflows.
  2. The addition of a localization system. The DISCOVER Cookbook has reached a point of maturity where editors feel confident in adding internationalization and localization processes. This project aims to establish a translation workflow for the DISCOVER Cookbook.

Both projects are representative of strategic and operational questions project leaders must answer for initiatives of this nature:

The documentation of the practices and the philosophy behind Outreachy as a mentorship program is one of the most fundamental aspects of this project. As you may know, we’ve been raising our concern about a significant decrease in funding for core program activities for almost a year. Unfortunately, despite our team’s herculean efforts to find more funding sources, our financial position hasn’t changed.

At its core, the Open Mentorship Handbook is a labor of love: it’s an initiative to disseminate the expertise our team has acquired running Outreachy for over 15 years. It’s a constructive way to cope with an existential threat: we’re striving for consolidating and transforming our lived experiences into perennial open practices. A gift to the open communities that have stood with us for so many years, open communities we have yet to know, and open communities that are yet to exist.

The other side of the coin are the impending cuts to program activities. After much consideration, we’ve decided to phase out a significant portion of our community engagement activities. We’re discontinuing our bi-weekly blog prompts, internship assignments for mentors and interns, and intern chats. We’re continuing to streamline internship evaluation cycles and invest our time in efforts to reduce the necessity of synchronous orientation of mentors and interns. We’re considering making public initial, midpoint and final reports including a description of activities and a list of artifacts created during the internship mandatory for interns.

As for progress of the June 2025 cohort, we currently have 25 active internships. 12 interns have passed their midpoint evaluation, and 11 interns are currently being evaluated. Unfortunately, one intern failed their midpoint evaluation, which resulted in an internship termination. We have one extended internship and one extension request under discussion and consideration.

Upcoming activities

My mission for the month of August is to answer most, if not all strategic and operational questions about the Open Mentorship Handbook listed above. My most immediate tasks:

My goal for the next two months is to widen the scope of our references, resources and interactions as key project elements become well-defined. As for program operations, my most immediate tasks are: