Hello everyone,

Wikimedia is participating in the winter edition of this year's Outreachy < https://www.outreachy.org/%3E [1] (December 2020–February 2021) and plans to mentor ~6 interns! The deadline to submit projects on the Outreachy website is September 24th, 2020.

This round will be a bit different for Wikimedia–we are considering keeping the focus of projects on data science and engineering. We hope that with a particular theme, interns will have more opportunities to interact with and support each other, and in turn, they will have a more fulfilling experience! For example, a project could be to analyze publicly available Wikimedia datasets to create valuable tools that can help perform vital tasks or generate insights that help make data-informed decisions. A project's nature could be coding or non-coding (documentation, design, research, outreach, translation, etc.). Though we plan to prefer the projects related to the theme, we still encourage you to reach out if you have other ideas.

If you would like to share an idea for a project that you would like to mentor or you are not familiar with the program and want to learn anything more about it, feel free to reply to this email or leave a note on < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258524%3E [2].

About the Outreachy program: Outreachy offers three-month internships to work remotely in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), coding and non-coding projects with experienced mentors. These internships run twice a year–from May to August and December to March. Interns are paid a stipend of USD 5,500 for the three months of work. They also have a USD 500 stipend to travel to conferences and events. Interns often find employment after their internship with Outreachy sponsors or jobs that use the skills they learned during their internship. This program is open to both students and non-students. Outreachy expressly invites the following people to apply:

- Women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. - Anyone who faces under-representation, systematic bias, or discrimination in the technology industry in their country of residence. - Residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

See a blog post highlighting one of our intern's experience participating in Outreachy program with Wikimedia < https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/08/26/lalithas-story-an-outreachy-intern... [3]

Some tips for mentors for proposing projects:

- Follow this task description template when you propose a project in Phabricator: < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/%3E [4]. Add #Outreachy (Round 21) tag to it. - Remember, the project should require an experienced developer ~15 days to complete and a newcomer ~3 months. - Each project should have at least two mentors, and one of them should hold a technical background. - When it comes to picking a project, you could propose one that is: - Relevant for your language community or brings impact to the Wikimedia ecosystem in the future. - Welcoming and newcomer-friendly and has a moderate learning curve. - A new idea you are passionate about, there are no deadlines attached to it; you always wanted to see it happen but couldn't due to lack of resources help! - About developing a standalone tool (possibly hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge), with fewer dependencies on Wikimedia's core infrastructure, it doesn't necessarily require a specific programming language. - See roles and responsibilities of an Outreachy mentor < https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors%3E [5].

We look forward to your participation!

Cheers,

Wikimedia organization admins for Outreachy (Pavithra, Gopa, and Srishti)

[1] https://www.outreachy.org/

[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258524

[3] https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/08/26/lalithas-story-an-outreachy-intern...

[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/

[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors

*Srishti Sethi* Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/