During the Contribution Period#

The Community Coordinator can help you organise and facilitate these activities if required.

Hold a Q&A session with Outreachy applicants#

It has been really beneficial to run a Q&A session with the applicants during the contribution period. This allows them to ask any clarifying questions they may have about the projects and/or tasks, or about JupyterHub in general.

Warning

Previously, this meeting has been held in the traditional team meeting slot (third Tuesday of the month), but this may be a bit late into the contribution period to be really beneficial for the applicants. Consider holding it in the first one or two weeks.

Preparing for and running this meeting involves:

  • Distributing a HackMD (or other collaboratively edited document) where applicants can add their questions ahead of time, along with the date, time, and joining info for the meeting itself

    • We have used Gitter, Discourse, and Twitter to disseminate this info previously

  • A day before the meeting, a mentor or the Community Coordinator should go through the document and curate the questions into broad topics

    • Applicants may repeat specific questions, or there may be a set of questions around a particular topic, and working this out beforehand can help structure the meeting and avoid repeating answers

  • During the meeting, ensure there is a scribe to document answers from the mentors. These notes can then be used to form a Discourse post to point applicants to later on in the contribution period.

Hold a sync-up meeting#

The mentors should sync-up around week 3 of the contribution period to assess the current state of the applicant pool. Here are some example questions they might consider during this sync-up:

  • Is one project getting more contributions than another? Why? What can be done to encourage applicants over?

  • Do any projects have a large amount of high quality applications? Is it worth closing the project to new contributors?

  • Are any of the microtasks proving too easy or difficult? Is there a need to create a new microtask?