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?