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Create standard operating procedure doc for Outreachy Design interns

Situation

The Fedora Design Team / Community Design Team participate in the Outreachy internship program. As part of this program, we onboard a large cohort of applicants into the internship program for about a month or so before we select an applicant and the internship fully starts. The applicants are mostly completely new to open source, to Fedora, and sometimes design. We have a relatively small team compared to the volume of applicants our project attracts, but would like the applicants to have an amazing, welcoming experience and receive timely feedback on their contributions.

Background

We had multiple venues to review incoming feedback requests: The Fedora Design Matrix channel, PMs on Matrix, emails, issues and issue comments in GitLab. This made it difficult to respond to feedback in the order it was requested, because there was no single order / timeline of feedback requests.

We also spent time explaining the same information repetitively and in an inefficient manner, and that meant not all applicants benefited from the information because it was spread out in chunks across all of these venues, and this all moved quickly and was difficult for applicants to keep up with and learn from. The Outreachy website for mentors is also difficult to navigate and manage, and is the first source of information about the project applicants encounter.

See https://gitlab.com/fedora/design/community-design-team/issues/-/issues/137 for additional background / survey data from applicants in the winter 2022/23 round.

Assessment

We have limited time and staff to be able to provide feedback to the volume of applicants our projects attract, so we should de-duplicate efforts as much as possible when running an Outreachy project.

Recommendation

  • Having multiple sources of truth and venues to share important information with applicants made it difficult for them to find it. We should decide on a single place (an epic in gitlab?) that we keep updated with the latest information / tips / advice and project spec, all in one place.

  • Having multiple queues to submit contribution review requests made it impossible to provide feedback in the order in which it was requested. We should work out a process using GitLab's "ToDo" system to create a single queue for feedback requests in first in, first out order, that enables multiple mentors to access the same ordered list and contribute to providing feedback.

  • Review further the feedback we got from surveying Outreachy participants on how their contribution period went to see if there are other improvements we could make to the applicant process.

  • Put together an SOP document that we can point future design mentors running an Outreachy internship to hopefully make the process smoother, covering the points above.

Edited by Máirín Duffy