Summary
Coordination tasks:
- Update Outreachy wiki for round 13
- On-board new organizations (9 ready, 6 pending)
Automation:
- Research moin variable substitution
- Research CiviCRM
Creative Works:
Getting ready for round 13
The application period for the December to March round opened on September 12. Much of the work this month was spent updating the wiki and communicating with potential mentoring organizations.
Updating the wiki
Updating the wiki is always a pain point. Multiple deadlines for the round are spread across many pages. Tricky wording must be carefully updated ("we invite sponsors for the upcoming round" to "we invite sponsors for the current round"). Some pages mention Google Summer of Code, which is only applicable during the May to August round.
What we really want is a way to generate the next round's page from a template, and update the other page dates based on deadline variable substitution. I spent a brief amount of time trying to figure out if Moin wikis could do variable substitution. Alas, they will use a per-user variable page, and make the substitutions before saving the page. Not terribly useful.
Migrating to a content management system that is designed to generate reports, like Drupal, might cut down on the amount of time spent hand-editing pages. It would also allow Outreachy to contract out some graphics and web layout work to make the site more appealing. Django might be another good choice for flexibility in the future.
Organization cat-herding
It's always a bit of a pain to keep track of the status of potential mentoring organizations. The best solution we have so far is a table in a private section of the wiki. Even when we send out the round announcement email to the outreachy announce mailing list, most organizations don't respond until someone gets sent a more personal email. I created a python script to transform Moin wiki tables of potential orgs into form-emails, and got many responses the same day.
There is a massive amount of contact information Outreachy handles between the project coordinators, organization mentors, sponsors, application system, and current and past interns. An Outreachy intern sent in a travel reimbursement request, but are they past the one-year deadline for travel funding? Which round did they participate in? Well, you'll have to click on two round pages, do a check in your email or the wiki to see if they used the travel funding, and double check if they asked for any exceptions.
It's really time to move to a consolidated contact relationship management (the other type of CRM). I spent some time researching CiviCRM, which is an open source CRM targeted at non-profits. The FSF uses it, as well as Wikimedia and others. It believe it could help us deliver invoices on time, expand the application system, track intern blogs, and much more. I've documented potential use cases on an admin-private web page.
Tapia Convention
This year, Outreachy is a sponsor for the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. Our goal is to spread the word about Outreachy, especially to people of color in the U.S.
As a sponsor, Outreachy gets to have a booth and publish a 1/4 page ad in the conference program. I created a 32"x80" banner for the booth, bought a matching table cloth, printed flyers, and ordered Outreachy stickers (using an existing svg version of our logo).
Git commits
I created a git repository for scripts and creative works related to Outreachy. My commit IDs for this month are:
16a2fcd5eb74f72cac09c74f585e08880bf478d4 Reorganize into directories. eb0c7f0db1e92f1f1d0f9fbe2620c6e14b82ad61 Add 1/4 page Outreachy ad for Tapia conference. b69bc9fb18a9af759af645bb2dc8d5be5ecdb988 Add vim command script for updating round pages. 76b7a9689d26ae4e32c2c6171fa68929c38a353f Add script to create personalized reminder emails for round opening. f30fa1c35a249212f52632c54b9518fb19a99a68 Add inkscape svg for 32"x80" Outreachy banner. c7fbfa006ac0773e94d3b5a618456de7b63c49f1 Add license and README.