June was a more eventful month than May. The internship was underway, and while much of the day-to-day work belongs to interns and their mentors, there was still enough to do.
A portion of my time went into mentor support and community coordination. I followed up with mentors across email and Zulip, answered questions, and stayed generally available to communities. Part of that involved navigating a difficult situation with one community, working through a mentor request to terminate an intern’s internship. These situations require care, and making sure all the right conversations happen before any decisions are made is something that is very important.
I also continued working on the Open Mentorship Handbook this month, contributing to Chapters 7 and 8, which cover supporting mentors and mentees, respectively. The work involved building on existing drafts and contributing new writing across both chapters, shaping content that will be useful to mentors and mentees in open source communities for a long time. I can’t wait to see how the Open Mentorship Handbook will shape internship programs.
On the website side, I started working on making it possible for coordinators to view internship feedback, a feature that has been requested by communities, and also worked on updating some outdated packages. There’s no pull request yet, but the groundwork is in progress. I also reached out to communities that had struggled to find mentors in previous rounds to understand how we could better support them going into the next one.
Tilda's Thoughts 