Frankly I don't care, in the short term, about how the money flows. I care about whether we can connect good mentors to good interns.
I'm with Alex : "I don't understand why we are still having these long discussions." I understand the differences of opinion. What I don't understand is why one position or the other has to be proven "right" before we can start actually working with interns. Doing the work will help us understand ourselves better. That's the first step we must take. Ross Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> From: Sam Ruby Sent: Saturday, June 29, 8:58 AM Subject: Re: Request for summary update (was Re: Does Outreachy mean we are paying for code? Is that acceptable?) To: [email protected] On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 10:47 AM Alex Harui <[email protected]> wrote: > > Can I get a summary of all of these Outreachy threads? I'm not on > private@diversity and I think I've read every email on this list, but I'm > seeing numbers like $10.5K being discussed and I have no clue where that > number came from. I'm on fundraising@ as well and still don't recall any > source for those numbers. Also, I thought that there was more than one > entity that was willing to donate directly to Outreachy and there was only > one or two ASF sponsors who were unable to redirect their money directly to > Outreachy, so I don't understand why we are still having these long > discussions. I shared this on fundraising, and I shared it on private@diversity. Not knowing how it would be received, I avoided sharing it publicly. It is with some trepidation that I do so now. Sunday (a week ago tomorrow) as I went to bed I had an idea. On Monday morning, I asked my management if they would consider sponsoring Outreachy directly, and specify that those funds are to be be used for ASF projects (Outreachy supports this as an option). By Tuesday afternoon, I had full and final approval for IBM to pay $19,500 to fund the next round of interns, for which the applications open in September and the interns themselves start in December. You can look at that as the ASF President went to an existing ASF sponsor and asked them to fund Outreachy interns who will be doing development. You can look at that as an IBM employee went to his employer and them to fund Outreachy interns who will be doing development. Both of the above statements are accurate. The check hasn't been cut, so I can stop it. The approval, and a number of purely procedural steps are all I need to complete to make it happen. So, I would like to ask both this committee and the board if this should continue. I also want to be clear: I did not talk to anybody else at the ASF to make this happen. The first anybody at the ASF heard about this was on Monday when I shared with fundraising that IBM was interested and on Tuesday when I shared with private@diversity that the funds were approved. Much of this discussion has been about finding creative ways to convince ourselves that this program is not /really/ about out paying for development when in fact development will occur and money will be paid, and we will be involved in the directing and orchestration of the process from the beginning to the end. My concern is even if we do this, we don't know whether we should continue. I think having sponsors giving us untargeted donations and us deciding at what levels we wish to be involved and whether or not we should continue would be a much better approach than having 30 individuals go off (like I did) and fund one to eight interns each (these are the published sponsorship levels that Outreachy offers). - Sam Ruby
