Internship for people facing discrimination in IT industry (NumFOCUS mini-grants)
Mariana Meireles
Hi all,
My name is Mariana, I've been active in the NumFOCUS ecosystem as a developer for a few years and I'm a part of Jupyter's Distinguished Contributors.
I was told to circulate this idea in the Jupyter emailing list before moving forward with it. I'd like to apply for a NumFOCUS small development grant to run a one person three months long open source internship where I am the mentor.
The structure of the internship would be very similar to the one used in the outreachy program. Here's a simplified outline:
Objective: Improve the software quality of Jupyter's expanded universe while at the same time introducing and fostering diversity in the open science ecosystem
Focus group: People who face systemic bias or discrimination in the technology industry of their country and come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds [1]
Work scope: Fix general bugs, add features (tests, greater integration with the rest of NumFOCUS' software stack), system's redesign (propose better API design, etc). The proposed projects are: ipycytoscape, any of the xeus kernels, but I'm also open for tackling other projects here, please see [2]
Internship duration: 3 months, 30h work/week [3]
Deliverables: Two blog posts that are somehow related to the work of the intern in the project. A number of issues solved and improved software for Jupyter.
Grant breakdown:
7000 USD - Intern salary [4]
1000 USD - Travel stipend [5]
Finally, I’m open to adopt other formats, in case someone would like to pick up on mentoring, for example, or be paid for it, we could increase the amount of money we’re asking in the grant.
I’m also very happy to hear about other grants or ideas on how to expand this project. I’m a member of NumFOCUS DISC committee and several people inside the organization support this idea.
If you're part of the Executive Council Members the Software Council Members, I'd especially like to hear from you. I'm also interested in the broader spectrum of what Jupyter's community have to say about it. I'm very open to constructive criticism and would love to discuss the idea further with you. I'd like to propose this for the next funding round which give us the deadline of June 2, 2023.
[1] I'm not sure how to make this process both dignifying and transparent to the people who apply. I think defining what is "disadvantaged socioeconomic background" is really hard. Right now I'm thinking of a) making it clear in the registration process b) when the candidate is chosen I'll ask them some sort of income proof and do my best to google if their income matches the murky "disadvantaged socioeconomic background" definition. If it does, they will be accepted.
[2] The reason why I chose these projects is because I'm a core contributor in them and know them well. I know the scope of these projects is quite small, they have at most a few thousand lines of code and offer a challenge that's not too big nor too small for the intern.
However, if the broader community think other projects should be considered I'm happy to re-evaluate.
[3] These numbers are copied from outreachy
[4] This salary might strike some people as quite high for an internship, especially if we might be focusing in developing countries or "disadvantaged socioeconomic background" people. However, I have a few arguments to advocate for such this salary: first this value is copied directly from outreachy's website and here there are two main points a) outreachy has been running for more than five years now and has introduced several folks from diverse backgrounds into open source successfully. b) as a past outreachy intern myself and knowing several other people who were part of the project, this somewhat large amount of money was what made it possible for us to catapult our careers and safely ensure us time and confidence to keep pursuing software development as a profession, either by moving countries or allowing us to focus on learning. Second, if you're interested in research done holding somewhat similar contexts in mind, you can find research under the give directly website, or the research of the economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs advising at the UN. I'm not sure if this is the best way, but it's something that seems worked in the past. Besides, as you can see, I'm doing this in a voluntary basis and I don't have the capacity to take on another intern.
Even if we could have 2 or more interns with one grant I wouldn't be able to mentor them.
[5] One of the biggest values for the intern from this tiny program would be the ability to network, therefore I'd like this person to travel to Europe (because it's where I'm located and it's easier for me to attend a conference in Europe) and attend one of the NumFOCUS relevant conferences. If they can get a free ticket and me too it'd be even better! My traveling costs would be covered by myself and the intern's by the 1000USD stipend.
Thanks,
Wishing everyone the best,
- mariana meireles
Carol Willing
Chris Holdgraf
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Mariana Meireles
I'm wondering if would make sense to limit the scope of the application pool to Africa with the hope of increasing adoption and participation there. Then if there was a follow up grant to serve the Global South or open to both Africa and the Global South.
While I would prefer if we ran the program through Outreachy since it would be simpler to implement, but I understand if that is not possible.
How would the selection process for the intern be done?
We can chat more at JupyterCon if you wish.