ISCBacademy webinar Feb 22: Yo Yehudi

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Nomi Harris

Date & Time: Tuesday, February 22, 2022, 15:00 UTC / 11am EDT
Location: online webinar hosted by ISCB
Speaker: Yo Yehudi, Open Life Science (former OBF board member and Google Summer of Code admin & mentor)
Topic: Growing open source communities with internships

The ISCB, which runs the annual ISMB conference, is offering a series of ISCBacademy webinars hosted by the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs), which include BOSC/OBF. These webinars are free to ISCB members.

If you are not an ISCB member but would like to register to attend this webinar, and the fee (which ranges from $5-$135) is a barrier, please fill out our application for a fee waiver.

Building communities for your open source computational tooling requires more than just technical expertise, and often isn’t as straightforward as building the tool itself. Having a community of contributors and users can make a big difference in many ways – additional community members will spot opportunities and bugs in your code that previously you didn’t notice, and may be able to offer unique skill sets to your team.

One effective way to grow your community can be via internships. Programs such as Google Summer of Code and Outreachy offer the chance to work with interns for 6-12 weeks, working on individual supervised projects whilst getting paid for their work.

This webinar will cover the ins and outs of participating in internship programs like this, from the perspective of a mentoring organisation. Topics will include:

1. Getting started with internship programs – finding mentors and defining a set of projects
2. Time commitments for mentors, before the application period and after interns are selected.
3. Funding for internship programs! (It’s not as tricky as you may fear – others handle this bit!)
4. Keeping interns engaged during the program and bringing them in as long-term contributors afterwards.

This webinar will be run by Yo Yehudi, who has been a mentor and organisation administrator for interns in GSoC and Outreachy since 2017, supervising over 35 interns for various open source organisations, and who co-leads Open Life Science, an organisation dedicated to training open research community builders.

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