Hey all, You already know this, but I ran some example numbers, and I figured you'd appreciate them.
We're too big to use Outreachy to significantly impact our diversity numbers. Just to take one dimension of one segment of our committer pipeline, and some simplified numbers as an example: if we have 8000 committers across all of our projects, and 5% are women, we'd need to add 444 women committers to raise the percentage of women committers to 10%. (8000*(.1 -.05)/(1 - .1)) If all of the Outreachy interns were women, and 90% of the Outreachy interns were to become project committers, we'd need to employ 494 Outreachy interns. Outreachy interns cost the org 6.5 thousand dollars, work for 6 weeks, and require roughly 5 hours of mentoring per week. *So raising participation of women to 10% would cost more than 3.2 million dollars, and nearly 15 thousand mentor hours, if done solely via Outreachy.* Of course several of my assumptions are downright silly. So, it would likely cost much more. But even that amount is currently well beyond our reach. And the participation of minorities in our projects is probably worse than the participation of women, so continuing this calculation along those dimensions is just going to get depressing. Direct impact on our diversity statistics can't be our goal in participating in Outreachy. Instead, one of the hopes that have been expressed with respect to hosting an Outreachy intern is that we'll be able to follow their progress and learn from the problems they encounter (following the "Switch" model (1)), so that we can figure out what's keeping people out of our communities and tackle those underlying problems. Naomi's recent e-mail on this is super exciting. I am really looking forward to watching the work she's describing. Best Regards, Myrle 1.) https://www.amazon.com/Switch-change-things-when-hard-ebook/dp/B005TKD512/
