Set and enforce expectations for Outreachy projects to produce public works

[contraexemplo]

One of the pillars of free and open source community is embracing openness in the way we work. Over the years, Software Freedom Conservancy and Outreachy staff has had several discussions about the discoverability of public works produced by Outreachy internships—we believe that embedding it into expectations for Outreachy projects has two main benefits:

1. It helps other contributors within a community to continue an intern's work, or to create new projects derivative of that intern's work¹.
2. They can be used to showcase an intern's hard and amazing work!²

What is considered a public work?

Anything publicly available that can be used to showcase an intern's work. It can be:

• Pull requests, commits, comments on issues
• Personal blog posts about their progress
• Mid and final internship reports

Ideas for how to tackle this issue

• Require plans for public works in the project proposal form and in our documentation about project proposals.
• Encourage mentors and interns to document work done during the project on mentor onboarding & support sessions.
• Require mentors and interns to list public works in feedback submissions (in Feedback cycles 2, 3, and 4).
• Modify blog prompts to encourage interns to continuously write about their project progress.

Footnotes

1. I can personally attest that my Outreachy reports helped a Google Season of Docs participant with Wikimedia. ↩

2. I still consider my mid-internship and final internship reports as some of my best technical writing and public comms work. ↩

[contraexemplo]

We still have time to discuss this as a policy change for the May 2025 cohort if we finalize a draft for a policy change in the first week of September.

[contraexemplo]

Changing the wording from "public artifacts" to "public works" to make that concept less abstract. Adding "enforce" because we do have some existing policies related to those expectations, but we need to transform and enforce them.

[contraexemplo]

We should talk about the expectation of having 'intermediate' public works (drafts, etc.)