Call for volunteers: mentor an Outreachy project

Community
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please visit.

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I don't think it will be a big factor. :slight_smile:

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Thanks! I have put in our application and hopefully we will hear back soon.

@A.N.M_AL-IMRAN I'm so happy to hear you're also interested in participating! It will be really great to have several mentors involved during the application period to evaluate applicants' starter tasks.

Now that we have good project descriptions, committed mentors and that our organization application is in, the next step will be to set up our organization landing page as described here. I think we can start by writing the landing page text in the same Google Doc we have been using for the rest of the organizing (this one). In this thread, we can decide how the landing page should be hosted. The options I see are:

  • As a Discourse topic in the Community category. Advantages: it's very easy to set up and edit.
  • As a Markdown page in a new Community GitHub repo. Advantages: nice for tracking changes. Disadvantages: harder for non-technical mentors to use?
  • ...?
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Good news, we're confirmed as an Outreachy organization! :tada:

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Congratulation for all of you.

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Congratulations all!

As a reminder, there's not necessarily a cut-off date for project ideas, so if people have good ideas for which there's an available & willing mentor, please share/propose those ideas! :slight_smile:

Personally, I'd vote for using the Discourse method @ln mentions above. If you make the opening post in a topic a "wiki post", you can still track changes that people make to the intro, and people can comment directly below with questions. (Those conversations could then be moved out to separate topics if they continue in-depth.) But curious to hear what others think!

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Congratulations to all!!

@LN The landing page should be hosted on Discourse (easy to find for members) and project ideas should live on Github (opportunity for non coders to learn Github, markdown and most of the workflow does involve using Github). Docs and Showing off the show case nicely fit into the existing docs repo as projects as per @downey suggestion . Website redesign might get its own repo

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Thanks everybody! And happy Cake Day, @Ronald_Munjoma! You have a cake next to your username because you joined the ODK community Sept 5, 2013 -- 4 years ago!! :tada:

I have started on a landing page draft available at the top of our brainstorming document (here). As always, please comment and edit as desired. @Ronald_Munjoma I propose that you be the one who posts the landing page in the Community category once we are all happy with it.

While I like what @Ronald_Munjoma said about putting the project descriptions on GitHub, I found that it would be easier for possible interns to find everything in one place. They will need to interact with GitHub for their starter task, though.

I also made a potentially controversial change by combining all project ideas into one. I did this because I think a lot could change between now and December when the internships start and I'd rather we have some flexibility to do things that are important then! Also, it gives an opportunity for interns to touch different aspects of the project that interest them. I'm on the list where Outreachy mentors report back on their experience and what a couple of them mentioned is that it can be a lot more helpful to have an intern who works on loosely connected tasks of high value than trying to fit everything into a project. This still gives us the flexibility to choose more than one intern if we get two complementary proposals. How do the rest of you feel about this?

I also reduced the amount of contact information for each mentor. I think it would be fine to share phone numbers, etc, in case of emergency once we have an intern selected but for now the ideal would be for all Outreachy-related conversations to happen in public. @A.N.M_AL-IMRAN I didn't list you as a mentor because I thought the list was getting long (what an amazing problem to have!). It would be great to get your help during the application period and to select the intern if you are still interested.

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Dear Hélène,

Of course, I am interested. Please let me know when my involvement is needed for anything.

Thanks,
Imran

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Fantastic, thanks so much, @A.N.M_AL-IMRAN!

I just sent out an email to Outreachy with our questions and CCed the mentors so you see the answer.

I'm seeing a lot of likes on my post above so hopefully that means you're on board with the proposed structure for the landing page. Unless anyone else objects, @Ronald_Munjoma I think it is ready for you to do a final review and then post in Community. I suggest the post title "Outreachy 2017" (creative, right?? :smile:).

Once you have the post up, we can discuss any necessary changes in this thread and evolve it as needed!

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Thanks Hélène,

I would be glad to be a part of it. Please let me know, with what and when to start with? Since I am a late comer on this project. It would be great to have an overview. I already went through the Outreachy Google doc. I am not clear yet, if I am in, what my role would be. However, I don't mind to contribute on anything. Just let me know, where to start with.

The objective of my involvement is: to work with the team to contribute to this noble initiative and learn from a diversified skilled group of people.

Thanks,
Imran

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Congrats for your achievements so far.
My question is, can I volunteer remotely?

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Absolutely, @awaafo_donald! In fact, we're all remote. :blush: I'll outline the process below. Also consider looking for other projects that could be interesting to you in the Contributing category and jumping into a conversation there.

@Ronald_Munjoma and I have worked together to get the landing page up at Outreachy 2017 and have sent it out to the Outreachy organizers. They will announce the program today or tomorrow.

Next steps:

  • Tweet about ODK's Outreachy participation from the OpenDataKit account (I think @yanokwa and @danbjoseph are the ones who can do that)
  • Retweet that tweet once it's out! This will help possible interns find us.
  • Make sure you are on the ODK Slack and in the #docs-code channel so you are ready to answer applicants' questions. @william1 I couldn't find you there so do make sure to join!
  • Follow the instructions to set up your local documentation environment. This is tricky and there may be some opportunities to improve the instructions. It would be super helpful if we could all do this and suggest improvements to the instructions as needed. If you have suggested changes to make, you can either follow the instructions to make the change yourself, discuss in #docs-code or post in the Documentation category. In particular, if you are on Windows, your help writing Windows instructions would be really appreciated!
  • When prospective interns come, welcome them and help them with any questions they have.
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Can we move the actual landing page to somewhere it can be edited communally, rather than a forum post that can only be updated by one person. Based on the current email thread with Outreachy, I think the content needs some clarification.

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We can put it in the docs repo without too much trouble, and we can even hide it from the Table of Contents if we want to.

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An Outreachy organizer pointed to: https://wiki.debian.org/Outreachy/Round15/Projects
as a good example. That page is a lot more specific about tasks/projects. I think that would be an improvement. It wasn't clear to Outreachy folks that we are looking for coding and non-coding folks.

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I have made the post a wiki post so that anyone with Level 1 permissions or greater can edit it.

Let's please discuss possible content changes here first. The questions in the Outreachy email thread are about how prominent the possible coding aspects of projects would be. I think we need to be careful that we can actually provide sufficient support since the majority of our mentors are non-coding. I think improvements to the docs pipeline would be fantastic as part of a broader project. @adammichaelwood do you think you would be able to support an intern writing a screenshotting script in an arbitrary programming language?

I would say we are looking for someone to do primarily non-coding tasks with the option to add some development if that matches the applicant's interests and can be scoped in a way that available mentors can help.

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@adammichaelwood do you think you would be able to support an intern writing a screenshotting script in an arbitrary programming language?

Java is a pretty arbitrary language...

Potentially, if they had Android experience already.

We have a few Python and HTML/CSS specific tasks that could add a lot value, which I can certainly support technically. (And we could have more if we had someone interested.)

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What about just splitting up the task list into coding and non-coding lists?

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Java is a pretty arbitrary language…

Hah! Well, a tool to generate screenshots wouldn't have to be in Java itself necessarily.

Ok, how about this -- we prepend (Coding) in front of the project ideas that require it on the landing page and we ask Outreachy to add text like "Could include coding in Python / HTML / CSS for those interested."