James Bottomley: Recruitment; Outreach Programmes

August 12, 2015

Related Material:

1. Outreach Program for Women (OPW)
2. Outreachy (rebranded OPW)

Additional Participants: Jerry Snitselaar, Julia Lawall, and Mark Brown.

People tagged:

James Bottomley suggested reviewing outreach programs and determining whether or not they are effective. James suggests the following three questions:

1. Should the programme be broadened (the current OPW one only reaches women, not everyone who might need outreach)?
2. Assuming we do decide broader is better, what's the next group to reach out to?
3. Is this type of outreach better than non group specific outreach? One can argue the kernel mentors list was non group specific and it didn't seem to get much uptake, so perhaps group specific is better? Essentially is it better for us to invest our efforts in specific segments rather than generally?

James contrasts this with the lengthy Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists) thread: This thread focuses on attracting new people, where the other thread focused on care and feeding of people who are already looking to join the community. Julia Lawall said that there are plans to expand OPW. Mark Brown noted that OPW has been rebranded as Outreachy, with a broadening of scope. Finally, Jerry Snitselaar suggested also looking at The Eudyptula Challenge as another outreach mechanism, noting that as of June, 88 people had completed the challenge.