Strengthening Underserved Segments of the Open Source Pipeline

Contributing to an open source project offers novices the opportunity to join a community of practitioners, build a technical portfolio, gain experience with industry tools and technologies, and have real-world impact. This project seeks to invite and support broader, more diverse participation in open source by supporting early contributors – especially those who have been historically minoritized within tech.

This work builds upon a number of existing projects with similar or overlapping goals. Some examples:

• The Teaching Open Source (TOS) community, which brings together instructors teaching open source
• The Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshops and wiki, for faculty teaching - or wanting to teach - open source
• Internships such as Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Outreachy, and the MLH Fellowship
• Open Source Comes to Campus, offering student workshops on tools and culture [no longer active]
• Google Code-in, inviting pre-university students to make open source contributions [no longer active]

This project will investigate gaps in currently available resources/programs and seek to address them, beginning with the exploration of engaging high school students with open source. Depending on early findings, this project could also entail the development of resources for independent learners and/or mentors.

Learning Resource Development + Repository-Building

• Topics: Education, Broadening Participation, Mentorship and Support, Community Development
• Skills: independent research, communication, organization, GitHub/Markdown, basic web programming (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
• Difficulty: Novice to Intermediate
• Size: Medium or Large (175 or 350 hours)
• Mentors: Emily Lovell, James Davis
• Contributor(s): Nandini Saagar

As an early contributor to this project, you will help gather information to inform the project direction – and then help bring it to life!

Possible tasks:

• Meet with teachers and/or community members to identify new opportunities to engage with students (e.g. outside-of-school workshops, classroom visits, materials for teachers to use independently)
• Evaluate and test existing learning activities with a high school audience in mind (e.g. consider necessary pre-requisites, time required, ideal activity format)
• Evaluate and organize existing resources for newcomers (e.g. Up For Grabs, Hacktoberfest, internship/fellowship opportunites)
• Help design and pilot new learning activities and/or workshops
• Assist in curating an open source repository of the aforementioned resources
• Conduct outreach to our target communities (e.g. brainstorm a catchy repository name, compose inviting and inclusive emails, design visual project elements)
• Share your own input and perspective on what it’s like to be a newcomer to open source!