Outreachy report: June 2026

Program activities

Changes to our blog post policy was well-received among interns. We’ve asked them to publish three blog posts throughout their internship, coinciding with moments of evaluation. I was proud of almost all of the blog posts I read! One, however, caught my attention for its vagueness and made me concerned about the prospects of that internship. The intern described the process of ramping up their work in really generic terms. It was difficult to connect what they wrote with the actual nature of their project.

Days later, we received a termination request for that very same intern. Their mentors reported an over-reliance on AI tools and unexplained absences. The intern was often uncommunicative or would take a long time to reply to their messages. They tried to remediate the situation with several conversations, but they noticed a pattern of slightly improvements and a return to old behaviors. Realizing that they may burn out if they continued to try to sustain this mentorship, they turned to us and recommended a termination. Meetings with mentors and the intern confirmed this diagnosis.

Outreachy has a very low internship failure rate. We’re currently at a rate of terminating one internship every two cohorts or so. As cohorts have been getting smaller, we do have more capacity to intervene in problematic situations sooner. But we’re still learning the true effects of AI-related conflicts in the contribution period and in our internships. We hope to remediate some of this through some of the changes we plan to implement in the December 2026 cohort (e.g. introducing a new essay question about the applicant’s technical abilities and experience).

Open Mentorship Handbook

June was a great month for the Open Mentorship Handbook! We started making deployments to GitLab Pages. I made a lot of progress editing Omotola Omotayo’s drafts and incorporating my own. I bought openmentorships.org to give it a more professional look. I published two whole sections of the handbook: Introduction to Open Mentorships and the learning path for mentees. I created several original diagrams describing the open mentorship ecosystem and lifecycle. And I rescued several beautiful photographs from our 1,000 interns celebrations to illustrate each chapter. I expect to fully launch version 1.0 next month!