Date: November 2022
Amount: $200,000

Outreachy provides internships to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers. The group operates as one of the Software Freedom Conservancy’s member projects. Anyone who faces under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is invited to apply. Outreachy internships are open to applicants around the world. Interns work remotely and are paid a stipend of $6,000 USD for a three month internship. Outreachy expressly invites women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people to apply, as well as individuals from other under-represented communities.

With this grant, Outreachy will:

• Continue to provide over 50 internships twice a year.
• Strengthen operations to bring resiliency and sustainability to the program.
• Evaluate and potentially launch an individual fundraising program so as to comfortably increase staff to support the initiative and bring stability for the coming years.
• Analyze and publish data from Outreachy historic participation to aid additional funding and advocacy.
• Communicate with relevant target populations so as to more effectively spread the word about the program and to develop strategic partnerships to further amplify its impact.

Update

With this grant, Outreachy supported 121 interns in the May 2023 and December 2023 cohorts.

Many of the software projects that were worked on as part of the internships are used by many millions of people worldwide, so the indirect impact of the program is even more significant (if harder to quantify). Many Outreachy interns work on projects that are critical to digital infrastructure, like Debian, Fedora, Git, GNOME, Linux kernel, OCaml, Perl & Raku, systemd, and QEMU.

An example of an Outreachy internship project with global-wide reach is Ushahidi and Humanitarian Open Street Map. Both of these offline mapping tools can be used by radio operators during crisis response. Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (HOTOSM) focuses on providing map data for disaster management, community risk analysis, and public health research. HOTOSM’s work is used by Red Cross societies, Médecins Sans Frontières, UN agencies and programmes, government agencies, and local NGOs and communities. Ushahidi uses HOTOSM’s work to provide offline tracking tools for humanitarian and disaster relief, human rights protection, and government accountability. Ushahidi was used heavily by volunteers during the Haiti earthquake in 2010: https://www.techradar.com/news/ushahidi-the-crisis-cartographer. Outreachy interns improved HOTOSM’s documentation and improved Ushahidi’s software tests. This core work is vital to ensuring radio operators can reference offline documentation during an emergency and not run into software bugs during a crisis.

For those hoping to run mentorship or internship programs, the Outreachy team has some advice:

• Mentorship is difficult work, and it’s important to support mentors as much as possible. We keep recordings of our Q&As and other videos available on our PeerTube channel (https://diode.zone/a/outreachy/videos?s=1).
• Intern feedback is critical. We collect feedback from our interns as well as our mentors, which gives us much better insight into the experience that interns and mentors are having.
• Providing flexibility for interns is important. Life can get in the way of an internship program like ours, and anticipating that from the outset is best. When an intern has an illness, death in the family or other unexpected event, it’s important to be able to respond quickly and to have policies already in place. We let interns know that they are able to take some of the time during the internship off, and we have robust policies on intern extensions.

Learn more at https://www.outreachy.org/.