Outreachy conda-forge Mid 2022 cohort

Decisions, open questions, and general management documentation for our mid 2022 Outreachy efforts.

Discussion is generally held in the #outreach-org channel in slack.

Community Application due Feb 25

conda-forge has already been accepted as a community in Outreachy.

Project submission deadline is pushed back to March 23, 2022 at 4pm UTC. Which basicially means Wednesday in the east, and Tuesday in the west.

Possible Projects

Guidance

The project submission has a standard format. This shows the sections that occurred in the September 2021 project submission form.

Project short title

Short title for this internship project proposal. This should be 100 characters or less, starting with a verb like "Create", "Improve", "Extend", "Survey", "Document", etc. Assume the applicant has never heard of your technology before and keep it simple. The short title will be used in your project page URL, so keep it short.

Long Description

Description of the internship project.
Please do not place educational restrictions (such as needing a degree) on this project. Outreachy applicants are judged on their demonstrated skills, not on their educational background. If your project requires knowledge that would normally be learned during a degree, your project contribution tasks should test applicants for that knowledge.

You should exclude applicant skills and communication channels. Those will be added in the next step.

You should also exclude discussion of internship tasks, internship benefits, repository URLs, issue tracker URLs, newcomer tags, or application period contribution tasks. Those are collected in the optional fields below.

Minimum System Requirements

What are the minimum computer requirements to contribute to this project during the application period? Examples: Operating system, CPU, memory, and hard drive space.

Many Outreachy applicants have older laptops. Many of them are working with ten year old systems (e.g. 1.6 GHz dual core with 2 GB of RAM). Please evaluate whether your project could better support contributors with older systems.

How can applicants make a contribution to your project?

Instructions for how applicants can make contributions during the Outreachy application period.

Make sure to include links to getting started tutorials or documentation, how applicants can find contribution tasks on your project website or issue tracker, who they should ask for tasks, and everything they need to know to get started.

Repository:

(Optional) URL for your team's repository or contribution mechanism

Issue tracker:

(Optional) URL for your team's issue tracker

Newcomer issue tag:

(Optional) What tag is used for newcomer-friendly issues for your team or for this internship project? Please use a tag and not a URL.

Intern tasks:

(Optional) Description of possible internship tasks. What smaller tasks will they start on? What is the main task or tasks for the internship? Do you have any optional stretch goals?
(3000 characters)

Intern benefits:

(Optional) How will the intern benefit from working with your team on this project? Imagine you're pitching this internship to a promising candidate. What would you say to convince them to apply? For example, what technical and non-technical skills will they learn from working on this project? How will this help them further their career in open source?

Community benefits:

(Optional) How will this internship project benefit the FOSS community that is funding it?

Mentor Profile / Employer

Outreachy organizers collect statistics about who mentors work for. This allows us to report anonymized statistics to Outreachy sponsors about how many of their employees participate as Outreachy mentors. The statistics help Outreachy organizers secure continued sponsorship. Some sponsors may want to offer training and other leadership opportunities to employees who are Outreachy mentors. We will ask for your consent before sharing your contact information with Outreachy sponsors. If you do not want to share your employer with Outreachy organizers, type 'Prefer not to say'. Your employer will not be displayed to Outreachy applicants.

Have you been a mentor for Outreachy before?

Outreachy welcomes first time mentors, but this information allows the coordinator and other mentors to provide extra help to new mentors.

• Yes, I have mentored in a past Outreachy round
• No, but I have mentored for Google Summer of Code or Google Code In
• No, but I have mentored for Rails Girls Summer of Code
• No, but I have mentored with another mentorship program
• No, I have never mentored before

What is your mentorship style?

Do you prefer short daily standups, longer weekly reports, or informal progress reports? Are you willing to try pair programming when your intern gets stuck? Do you like talking over video chat or answering questions via email? Give the applicants a sense of what it will be like to work with you during the internship.

How long have you been a contributor on this team?

A community can be comprised of many different teams that each work on separate subsystems, modules, applications, libraries, tools, documentation, user experience, graphical design, and more. Typically each Outreachy project involves working with a particular team in the community. If the Outreachy intern would work with the whole community rather than a particular team, consider the community to be a team for these questions.

What contributions have you made to this team and this community?

If none, what contributions have you made to other FOSS communities?

Project Skills

Many Outreachy applicants have impostor syndrome. They may under-estimate their skills, or think they need to be an expert to apply to your project. People with impostor syndrome may only apply if they have 100% of the skills you're looking for. If you don't list project skills correctly, applicants may not pick your project. Outreachy requires mentors to list project skills as follows:

• Skill name (just one skill) (max 100 character, 1-3 words to describe the project skill, and don't use sentences with parenthesis)
• How much experience does applicant need in that skill?
  1. No knowledge required: Mentors are willing to teach this skill to applicants with no experience at all
  2. Concepts: Applicants should have read about the skill
  3. Experimented: Applicants should have used this skill in class or personal projects
  4. Comfortable: Applicants should be able to expand on their skills with the help of mentors
  5. Challenge: Applicants who are experienced in this skill will have the chance to expand it further
• Is the skill required, preferred, or optional for applicants?
  • Choose this carefully! Many Outreachy applicants only apply to a project if they meet 100% of the skill requirements.
  • Optional: It would be nice if applicants had this skill, but it will not impact intern selection
  • Preferred: Mentors will prefer applicants who have this skill
  • Required: Mentors will only accept applicants who have this skill as an intern

Please do NOT list more than one skill in the skill description.

Please do NOT use full sentences. The project skills are used as search tags. Keep skill names to 1-3 words.

Please do NOT list educational restrictions (such as needing a university degree). Outreachy applicants are judged on their demonstrated skills, not on their educational background. If your project requires knowledge that would normally be learned during a degree, your project contribution tasks should test applicants for that knowledge.

Please do NOT require or prefer applicants that have previously contributed to your community. Each Outreachy applicant must have a fair chance to be selected as your intern. Requiring applicants to have contributed to your community means you are limiting opportunities for people who have not networked with your community. It also means your applicant pool will reflect whatever diversity (or lack thereof) your community already has.

Project communication channels

Most applicants won't be familiar with using FOSS communication channels. Applicants are especially confused by communication protocols like IRC, which usually require client-side software. We add special links around IRC channels to help ease applicants into learning IRC.

Some applicants may be familiar with a communication tool (like a mailing list) but they not be aware of common FOSS communication norms. They may ask the wrong channel for help, and then go away when no one answers. Adding information here will help them communicate better with mentors.

You can fill out the optional fields below. If you need to add more communication channels than there are fields, you should save this internship project proposal and then click 'Edit Project information'.

For each communication channel:

• Communication tool name: The name of the communication tool your project uses. E.g. "a mailing list", "IRC", "Zulip", "Mattermost", or "Discourse"
  Communication channel URL: URL for the communication channel applicants will use to reach mentors and ask questions about this internship project. IRC URLs should be in the form irc://<host>[:port]/[channel]. Since many applicants have issues with IRC port blocking at their universities, IRC communication links will use Kiwi IRC to direct applicants to a web-based IRC client. If this is a mailing list, the URL should be the mailing list subscription page.
• Instructions on joining: (Optional) After following the communication channel link, are there any special instructions? For example: "Join the #outreachy channel and make sure to introduce yourself.
• Community norms: (Optional) What communication norms would a newcomer need to know about this communication channel? Example: newcomers to open source don't know they should Cc their mentor or the software maintainer when asking a question to a large mailing list. Think about what a newcomer would find surprising when communicating on this channel.
• Communication tool documentation URL: (Optional) URL for the documentation for your communication tool. This should be user-focused documentation that explains the basic mechanisms of logging in and features. Suggestions: IRC - https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreachy/IRC; Zulip - https://chat.zulip.org/help/; Mattersmost - https://docs.mattermost.com/guides/user.html

Project 1: Documentation

Project short title

Documenting the conda-forge ecosystem

Long Description

Conda-forge relies on its documentation to welcome new community members, teach community members how to write conda-forge recipes, and provide technically sophisticated community members with guidance for specialized tasks. As our community has grown over time and our infrastructure has developed, the documentation has fallen behind. Furthermore, the current documentation for new community members is not accessible enough.

We are looking for contributors to help us improve our documentation and address these issues. We especially welcome contributors who are new to conda-forge. As a new contributor, you will have a unique perspective on how we can make our documentation easier to understand and more accessible. Experienced contributors are also welcome, especially for documenting detailed technical tasks and recipe maintenance. The kinds of contributions we are looking for include fixing simple errors (e.g., broken links, spelling, grammar, missing information, etc.), revising the structure of the documentation as appropriate, adding tutorials or how-to guides for new users, and improvements to our overall documentation workflow.

As an intern with conda-forge working on documentation, you will work with your mentors through github issues and pull requests. You are welcome to submit pull requests fixing issues as you find them. For more detailed tasks, you can open a github issue. Your mentors will be available to guide you towards the best way to complete the task. Finally, interns are encouraged to attend the biweekly conda community and conda-forge dev meetings to learn more about our community, get to know our current contributors, and report on their progress.

Miniumum System Requirements

Applicants will need internet access and a system capable of building Sphinx documentation (go here, scroll down, and see the Improving the docs section).

How can applicants make a contribution to your project?

As part of the application process, all applicants must make at least one contribution to be accepted as an intern for this project. Only applicants who make a contribution will be eligible to be accepted as interns. We also recommend contributors to be a conda user and/or submit a package to conda-forge via staged-recipes.

See the following docs for how to improve the documentation.

Applicants can contribute to this project through the project repository or contribution page. The project uses an issue tracker to list information about bugs to fix, project features to implement, documentation to write, and more.

Initial submission

We ask that applicants start with issue #1346 and have their changes reviewed and approved before moving on to any other issues. To do this:

1. Fork the conda-forge.github.io repo. (If you have trouble with this step, please ask for help in the conda-forge interns chat.)
2. Make the changes required by issue #1346.
3. Tag Matt or Katherine in the conda-forge interns chat to let them know that the changes in your fork are ready for review.
4. Make any changes required by the review.
5. Get your changes approved.
6. Celebrate! You're ready to move on to other issues.

After completing work on issue #1346, applicants can look for newcomer-friendly issues to use for their first contributions by looking for the following issue tags in the project issue tracker: Outreachy, Docs.

Some ready-to-go ways you can get started contributing on your own

• Find an open issue to tackle or report a bug to the issue tracker.
• Don’t be afraid to communicate! Ask if you can help write a new feature, if you find a topic you would like to cover.

As this project's main goal is enhancing our current documentation, here are some preliminary tasks that you can inspect to get ideas:

• Write and improve the project’s documentation.
• Link to duplicate issues, and suggest new issue labels, to keep things organized.
• Go through open issues and suggest closing old ones.
• Ask clarifying questions on recently opened issues to move the discussion forward.

How do I work with the conda-forge community?

Outreachy applicants can get help and feedback from both mentors and community members. Community members discuss their contributions in a public chat. Outreachy applicants can often learn from those discussions.

Please introduce yourself on the outreachy-specific chat, and on the conda-forge public project chat:

• conda-forge interns chat
• conda-forge public chat

Once you read the project description, and if you are interested in the project, go directly to the above links.

Outreachy mentors will often be in the community public chat. The project mentors are:

• Matt Becker (@beckermr)
• Katherine Kinnaman (@kathatherine)

Matt and Katherine are both based in North America. During other parts of the day, other community members may be available to help.

Gitter and Element

The two chat links above point to Gitter rooms. Gitter is a chat platform with a long history in open source software communities. However, it is being slowly replaced by Element. Element and Gitter are owned by the same company, and you can view all public Gitter rooms in Element.

Element takes more effort to set up, but is a generally better experience than the Gitter client. We suggest using it. You will need to select gitter.im/Matrix from the "Matrix Rooms" pulldown to find the conda-forge rooms.

Repository:

https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io

Issue tracker:

https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues

Newcomer issue tag:

Outreachy, Docs

Intern benefits:

Interns working on the documentation project will learn how documentation changes are made in an open-source coding project. They will learn how to communicate with many different kinds of people as we all collaborate on the best way to document project features and make the project understandable to novice and expert users alike.

Community benefits:

The conda-force community will gain new voices and perspectives in documentation, as well as more people looking at and editing their documentation.

Mentor Profile / Employer

Have you been a mentor for Outreachy before?

• Matt Becker - Yes, I have been a mentor in the past.
• Katherine Kinnaman - No, I have never mentored before.

What is your mentorship style?

• Matt Becker - I prefer an informal style, answering questions and providing help as needed. Communication through github issues and PRs is easiest for me. I am also available to chat through gitter if the need arises.
• Katherine Kinnaman - I prefer informal progress reports, as opposed to structured standups or weekly reports. I am willing to pair program if an intern gets stuck, but prefer answering questions over email, as it gives me time to research the answers to questions I don't know and gives me a record of what has been discussed.

How long have you been a contributor on this team?

• Matt Becker - I have been a core dev for conda-forge for several years.
• Katherine Kinnaman - I have been a contributor at the company Anaconda for three months, which works with communities like conda-forge. I have only just started contributing to conda-forge.

What contributions have you made to this team and this community?

• Matt Becker - I have contributed to a large number of things in conda-forge, spanning everything from packages/feedstocks to core infrastructure like our webservices, compilers, autotick bot, and conda-smithy.
• Katherine Kinnaman - I have recently begun improving conda-forge's documentation.

Project Skills

Project communication channels

Communication tool name - Gitter
Communication channel URL - https://gitter.im/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io
Instructions on joining - Go to the URL and click Sign in to start talking. You can link your gitter account to your GitHub account.
Community norms - If you have a question specifically for one of your mentors, make sure you tag us in your message with an @ symbol.
Communication tool documentation URL - https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/tree/develop/docs#documentation

Project 2: Grayskull and Friends

Project short title

Long Description

Miniumum System Requirements

How can applicants make a contribution to your project?

Repository:

Issue tracker:

Newcomer issue tag:

Intern tasks:

Intern benefits:

Community benefits:

Mentor Profile / Employer

Have you been a mentor for Outreachy before?

What is your mentorship style?

How long have you been a contributor on this team?

What contributions have you made to this team and this community?

Project Skills

Project communication channels

Contribution Period

The contributiion period is a month long window where applicants carry out tasks that demonstrate their alignment with the proposed project(s). This is a great opportunity to figure who the best matches might be. It is also an overwhelming time for mentors. Applicants post all sorts of questions and requests for help and it can quickly overwhelm the team when we have over 100 applicants, which is a common occurance.

Outreachy has 6 suggestions for avoiding burnout.