Hi Naomi,
Sorry for the top post. This is good work! I'm glad you and Gris have a
framework built around this, and I think it's going in all the right
directions. You have my support!
-Joan
On 2019-06-24 10:45 a.m., Naomi Slater wrote:
I was lucky enough to catch up with Gris last week in Berlin for dinner. I
shared some of my ideas about I think we should work with Outreachy. as it
happens, it matches up quite well with what she already had in mind. and we
realized that elaborating on this stuff will hopefully do a better job of
explaining how this benefits the foundation
here's a rough sketch of what I am proposing:
- getting Outreachy interns working on our projects isn't the end goal.
we shouldn't be thinking of this as a way to improve our demographics one
intern at a time
our primary objective, as a committee, is to improve the foundation by
making our communities more welcoming, safe, inclusive, fair, easy to
contribute to, and so on. to that end, we need to understand the
experiences that people from under-represented groups have while trying to
contribute
- Outreachy presents a fantastic opportunity to work with and learn from
people as they go through that process
from the D&I committee's perspective, the purpose of each internship
should be to gather as much information as possible about the intern's
journey. and that information should focus on areas that relate to our
primary objective
- mentors are responsible for gathering this information, and reporting
back to the D&I committee regularly. in particular, we should look at
creating something like what Google calls friction logs. (thanks to Gris
for explaining this to me!)
https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-friction-logging
a friction log is a form of user research, and this will complement the
other research we're planning
the difference here is that the information we gather through Outreachy
will be coming from people who are directly trying to contribute to the
ASF. whereas, the other research we are planning will focus on surveying
people who have not contributed
combined, this will give us a better picture of the overall "funnel"
(i.e., the stages of someone's awareness of, and involvement with, the
foundation). something we discussed on the lists, early this year
now, some additional details about how I propose we structure the program:
- mentors will have two primary responsibilities:
1. working with the intern, per Outreachy's own framework
2. reporting back to the D&I committee, per a D&I mentorship
framework that we will develop
- each mentorship requires a steward from the D&I committee. that
steward is responsible for working with the mentor to ensure they follow
the D&I mentorship framework
- the primary deliverable for each mentorship is a report (or set of
reports) to the D&I committee. reports are standardized as a part of the
D&I mentorship framework and will include friction logging and other
information pertinent to our primary objective. we will improve this
framework over time. (and indeed, we may be able to adapt it for other
sorts of internships)
- the D&I committee will then:
1. handle all reports, synthesize them and attempt to draw conclusions
2. develop recommendations based on those conclusions
3. publish findings on our website or blog
4. socialize those findings within the foundation
- it will be up to the individual projects within the foundation to
decide how to make use of findings we publish. we will encourage people to
use [email protected] (analogous to users@) as a support
forum for working with the information we publish
hopefully, with a structure like this in place, the Outreachy proposal
starts to address some of the outstanding concerns that people have
and I am hoping that we can develop this proposal into something more
concrete
thanks!
