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R Contribution Working Group: fostering a larger, more diverse community of contributors to R core development
https://contributor.r-project.org/working-group
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Outreachy internships #15

Closed hturner closed 1 year ago

hturner commented 2 years ago

Various people have expressed an interest in doing an Outreachy internship with the R project (by contacting the R Foundation board, or asking on R-Ladies Slack groups). A blocker has been the high Mentor requirements (5-10 hrs/week during 6 week application period, 5 hrs/week during 3 month internship) and the need to find at least 2 mentors that can commit to this (see Coordinator duties).

However, I think we can make this work by co-mentoring projects (see FAQ), with the primary mentor being an expert (R Core member/experienced contributor) that volunteers < 1 hour/week and the secondary mentor being someone that can commit to daily supervision. This worked quite well for @SaranjeetKaur's documentation project, with myself and @lawremi meeting with Saranjeet for 30 min each week and myself providing ad-hoc support/documentation review in between (not daily supervision, but similar principle).

Outreachy requires the community (R project in our case) to find $6500 to fund one intern, then we can apply to the general Outreachy fund for another intern. I can commit to regular supervision for one intern under my fellowship and hopefully could pair up with an R Core member/experienced contributor relevant to project. If we had a second intern funded by Outreachy, we could potential pay someone to regularly supervise that project (again pairing with a member of R Core/experienced contributor if additional expertise required). A suitable stipend might be $3000-$6000 for such a supervisor, bring the cost to $9500 - $12500 for two interns, which seems reasonable.

It would also be helpful to have volunteers to help during the application phase.

Potential projects, building on our work so far:

Important Round Dates Mid-year Internships End of year Internships
Call for mentoring communities opens early January early August
Initial applications open early February late August
Initial applications due end of February early September
Contribution period opens mid March early October
Contribution period ends mid April end of October
Interns announced mid May late November
Internships start May December
Internships end August March
jtelleriar commented 2 years ago

Could "Google Summer of Code" also be within the internship category, in addition to Outreachy?

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

hturner commented 2 years ago

@jtelleriar can you open this as a separate issue? I think there are different considerations for the GSoC program, which we could discuss separately.

hturner commented 2 years ago

@gmbecker is willing to mentor, so we have enough to come back to this in the new year

hturner commented 2 years ago

Our community application is submitted and pending approval: https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/the-r-project-for-statistical-computing/.

We have till March 23 for mentors to propose projects.

Current plans:

We also have some tentative ideas around translations (standardize and improve the translatability of the English messages, or translating messages in a language that is not well covered, or creating a dashboard to summarise translation status). However this area is not such a good match to available mentors - if anyone would like to volunteer, do let me know!

hturner commented 1 year ago

Our application was not approved, so some project ideas were redirected to Google Summer of Code: