It's a nice idea, but we are all volunteers and mentorship is a full-time commitment. I'm not sure if we have the bandwidth to responsibly plan an internship.

Not sure what you mean with "full-time commitment", since I doubt that many mentors will be able to spend full time on it. What kind of mentoring would be possible?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Contributor_Recruitment states that recruiting new members for Diversity and Inclusion is a primary goal, so hopefully there will be more people that will need mentoring in the future.

There is also the possibility to promote/use https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/timeline

Not sure what you mean with "full-time commitment", since I doubt that many mentors will be able to spend full time on it. What kind of mentoring would be possible?

I see mentoring an internship as a full-time commitment. When I say full-time commitment, I mean an assumption that I am a reliable contact to support this commitment X number of days a working week for Y amount of months. I question if the D&I Team is sustainable enough for the demands of an internship program.

I volunteered my free time last summer with @jonatoni and @bt0dotninja for a Fedora Outreachy project. While I appreciate that experience, I realized it was a significant, non-trivial investment of my time and energy in providing quality mentorship that both contributes to the success of Fedora and also offers development opportunities for the interns.

I am less apprehensive if a mentor of another Fedora intern seeks a D&I perspective as a way to collaborate with us. It's a lot to ask this all-volunteer team to take on an intern. It's not as much work for this team to give feedback on a D&I-related aspect of another internship project. One example might be requesting accessibility and design feedback for an application developed under the Mentored Project / Summer of Code.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Contributor_Recruitment states that recruiting new members for Diversity and Inclusion is a primary goal, so hopefully there will be more people that will need mentoring in the future.

This is a nice goal. I wonder who wrote it? :)

To attempt painting this from my perspective, I see this goal as handed from Council to the Fedora D&I Team. The D&I Team was not publicly asked if this goal made sense, or if on-boarding new people is what we need to solve our problems. I think the D&I Team was likely involved too late in the Contributor Recruitment conversation, because an influx of new people challenges the sustainability of our existing work.

That said, I do want to follow with appreciation for the work @riecatnor and other Councilfolk have done to bring focus to the D&I Team for this initiative. In doing so, we are getting to have deeper and more valuable conversations about Fedora D&I. But I think we need to figure out and define mentorship for this team before we work to bring on more work that requires people power, not money, to solve.

@jflory7 I showed up at a D&I meeting to talk to y'all about participating experimentally in the contributor recruitment plan. Which, is most likely on hold currently as that is really trying to take advantage of our presence at events. Maybe it could be converted to a digital plan... I digress. Anyways, D&I told me as a group they would prefer to mentor new people on how to upkeep D&I responsibilities so they can move onto other things and that they were very interested. I believe you were there. Did I misunderstand that?

Which, is most likely on hold currently as that is really trying to take advantage of our presence at events.

Hey @riecatnor! I think this might actually be a positive because it gives us more time to think about this from different angles.

Anyways, D&I told me as a group they would prefer to mentor new people on how to upkeep D&I responsibilities so they can move onto other things and that they were very interested. I believe you were there. Did I misunderstand that?

Originally I was on-board with this too. More new people always sounds nice when talking about volunteering contributors! But the past few weeks has made me think more on both the benefits and costs to focusing on newcomer on-boarding.

I think on-boarding requires structure that Fedora D&I does not have in place. The "pre-requirement" for Contributor Recruitment plan is a "house" for all the people you invite to come inside. Currently our house is about the size of a gazebo. It works well enough for the tasks and people we have enough, but it's difficult for us to know what to do if a bunch of new people also want to get on the gazebo. :)

To move past metaphors and suggest something constructive, I think some of the answers to these challenges are tied to solving our governance challenges. Before COVID-19, we wanted to plan a 2020 Hackfest to get the team together with a specific focus on sustainability. Maybe we need to spin up that conversation again on how we can do this virtually…

To attempt painting this from my perspective, I see this goal as handed from Council to the Fedora D&I Team. The D&I Team was not publicly asked if this goal made sense, or if on-boarding new people is what we need to solve our problems. I think the D&I Team was likely involved too late in the Contributor Recruitment conversation, because an influx of new people challenges the sustainability of our existing work.

What are the problems of the D&I team and how can they be solved?

Just noticed that there is ticket #65 open here and it is about growing the team.

I am reviewing this ticket again, and an Outreachy intern is something that has come up often. However, @amsharma, @jonatoni, @bee2502, and myself also acknowledged that we do not have bandwidth and time to take on responsibility for an intern as volunteers. It is not something we are capable of doing at the moment.

I am thinking to close this ticket as out of scope because we do not have someone to drive or own this planning and mentorship work. Are there any objections to closing?

I am thinking to close this ticket as out of scope because we do not have someone to drive or own this planning and mentorship work. Are there any objections to closing?

If it is not possible to have an intern, this ticket should be closed. Ideally, there would be a plan how to improve the D&I team so that it would be possible in the future. There seems to be a fundamental problem here, since there does not seem to be enough capacity to onboard new members but without new members there won't be more capacity.