Outreachy report: October 2025
Summary
Program activities
- We received 2 code of conduct reports in the last month. 1 of the reports involved an apparent phishing attempt.
- 12 communities participated in the contribution period. 1 community withdrew their participation after a couple of weeks.
- 2 communities reported issues with an increased use of LLMs in contributions. One of those issues resulted in a code of conduct report.
Open Mentorship Handbook
- Omotola, Tilda and I have also contributed to a newly defined outline of the Open Mentorship Handbook, which can be accessed here.
I’m once more in a situation where the public report has to be vague because I dealt with several confidential matters over the course of October. My attention was focused on investigating a security incident and monitoring how LLMs are affecting mentor-applicant relationships in the contribution stage.
I plan on writing a more detailed post about LLMs and new generations of contributors, but this is not the first time a community reports increased LLM usage and a decrease in quality contributions. We’re concerned it’s getting worse. We’ve made a couple of tests throughout the last 12 months — promoting Outreachy in specific tech communities and circles around the world, studying declared skills from applicants to try to make sure our applicant pool is compatible with our project pool —, but nothing has yielded significant results yet.
I’ve been seeing a decline in independence and curiosity among undergraduates at the university I’m attending, and I have to wonder if this is generational as well as a reflection of LLM usage. I wonder, too, if this is a reflection of processes that were interrupted by the pandemic (tranferring knowledge from one generation to the other).
Some discussions point to differences in expectations around engagement and learning. Abigail Cabunoc Mayes suggests a couple of different approaches for younger contributors based on some surveys about their learning and engagement styles. But that only addresses a specific portion of the problem. We’ll have to have extensive conversations with mentors on how to handle this in future cohorts.