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Outreachy report: July 2026

The homepage of the Open Mentorship Handbook

I spent July immersed in Open Mentorship Handbook work. And I’m happy to report that, after a year of studies, community engagement, writing and editing, the very first version of the Open Mentorship Handbook is live at handbook.openmentorship.org. As stated in the Acknowledgements page, this handbook is a collective effort to document decades of knowledge built by practitioners, in special what Outreachy organizers have learned running the program. NumFOCUS, in special Arliss Collins and Kamila Stepniowska, supported seeding discussions about an Open Mentorship Initiative at the DISC Unconference 2025. Our days of discussion resulted in an outline for the handbook we used as a guide for the book we publish today. I am now leading discussions at the DISC Committee to adopt the Open Mentorship Handbook to guide NumFOCUS project members in their mentorship efforts and incorporate their mentoring practices into the handbook.

Exploring to different programmatic approaches was a highlight of this project. Big Open Source Sibling (BOSS) program organizers Bruna Pinos and Bruna Moreira provided us wide access to program artifacts to help us shape the sections about program design. Lab Livre/UnB, and in special Maria Eduarda Andrade, Daniela de Oliveira, Suzane Duarte, Carla Rocha and Isaque Alves, gave us the opportunity to publish some of our insights in a joint paper accepted by the Women in Information Technology conference, a event at the Congress of the Brazilian Society of Computing. We had the pleasure to present a technical session about it — and promote our handbook — in Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul. Our mentoring approach has been adopted at Lab Livre/UnB to fuel the development of free software projects such as Brasil Participativo and Gov Hub.

We take the stage at CSBC to present our paper at WIT and promote the Open Mentorship Handbook.

PorteraTech (through CodeCon Meetup Goiânia), Cumbuca Dev (through Nosso Open Source Summit — NOSS) and CryptoRave also welcomed us to host our discussions about open mentorships and the sustainability of open projects. Erin McKeon introduced the Open Mentorship Handbook in our behalf at Open Source Summit Japan 2026.

Anna talks about the current conjucture for FOSS. Anna talks about the greying open source myth.

As Outreachy’s home organization, Software Freedom Conservancy, in special Karen M. Sandler and Daniel Pono Takamori, supported us through the process of applying to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant that funded our research, writing and editing efforts, and helped us host further discussions at FOSSY 2025. Karen will write a foreword for the handbook to be published soon.

I wish I could write more, but this was an exhausting month! As we move into a stage where we incorporate more external contributions, I hope to feel more energized to talk about some of our project choices (e.g. how I like Zensical, what other tools I’d recommend for someone wanting to do this kind of publishing). For now, I just want to enjoy this feeling of accomplishment!