The Outreachy internship programme has started accepting applications from mentoring organizations for its Summer 2023 round. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) will do so in a few days.
We have participated before and we could participate again for this round.
The main question is whether we could find people motivated to mentor potential interns. Candidate mentors can submit project proposals of their liking, but there are a few points to keep in mind:
- for Outreachy, it does not have to be code contributions: for instance, documentation projects are in scope too. For GSoC, only programming projects are eligible.
- it does not have to be focused on OpenRefine’s core: for instance, working on an extension or reconciliation service could be in scope;
- internships run for 3 months in Outreachy, and can be longer in GSoC.
Mentors should be existing OpenRefine contributors. They should be able to carry out themselves the projects they propose, faster than the planned internship, so that they can guide the intern appropriately during the internship. They should obviously also have time to meet regularly with the intern (remotely) during the course of the internship.
Mentors also get a small compensation for their effort (I could not find the exact figure on the GSoC website, but if I remember correctly it was USD 750 in 2020, and Outreachy does not give a compensation itself but we decided to do it from OpenRefine itself at the last round and that was USD 1000).
In my experience, the most demanding period is the phase before the internships themselves where applicants try to get some initial contributions in the project. Those are mandatory for both programmes and ensure that applicants able to make small contributions independently. This generally results in a spike of activity on the repository, which is a good thing but requires some responsiveness from the team.
Would people be interested in mentoring this summer?