 Thank you all for coming. My name is Emily Lovell and I'm here today representing the UC Santa Cruz open source program office. The display just got real weird. Okay. Remix. Okay, so we are an academic Ospo which puts us in really unique proximity both to students who are looking for research experience and technical experience and also the scientists who are developing new projects, research projects that they're hoping to grow into self-sustaining open source communities. So today I'm going to talk about our experience matching students with mentors to the benefit really of all parties involved. So a little bit about me first. My role within our office is that I'm a postdoc. My research for a long time has focused on strengthening sort of underserved areas of computing education and inviting broader participation from historically minoritized students. So within this context I'm really focusing on underserved parts of the open source education pipeline, mostly at the university level, but also starting to think about some outreach to high school students, which I'm really excited about. So I came to this position really as like a researcher practitioner with my own teaching practice and again, longstanding interest in broadening who's in computing. So some of the projects that led to this where I did a few years of research in the supporting computational craft sort of DIY electronics communities, which was also really built on open hardware using open hardware tools as a foundation. So this is an example of work during that time, which was adding a really low cost pre-programmed microcontroller to the Lillipad Arduino lineup. This was my master's thesis work and then developing curriculum to support more people engaging with these types of activities. And of course I learned a lot through this process from students and other more experienced educators and all that. So later on in my graduate career, I had actually just a one day experience mentoring open source software contribution with university students before I had any experience in that area myself, but I was really struck by how rich the experience was for undergraduate students. They were learning how to use world tools. They were improving communication skills and they were really excited about having like a real world impact, oftentimes positive social impact. So this led me to this group of folks, which is a working group of faculty also Red Hat was involved for quite a while running professional development workshops called Posse, the professor's open source software experience, to basically help more faculty teach open source at their own schools. And then I actually was poached out of my PhD program through people I knew from the Posse workshops to go teach at Berea College, which is a small liberal arts college in Berea, Kentucky. And while I was there, perks of being at a small school, I had the opportunity to develop my own open source contribution class. And this was really exciting for me, especially given that Berea serves exclusively students of great academic promise, but limited economic means. So all Berea students are on full tuition scholarships from low income backgrounds. And there's I think 20 or 40% of the I think it's 40% of the student body identifies as persons of color. So it's quite a diverse place to be doing this sort of work. So that brings me to now where I am a postdoc, as I mentioned, there is one other postdoc in our office. And we are funded through these incubator fellowships, which is really cool and new also, kind of unique to academic Ospo setting. And we are essentially open source ambassadors, who, you know, really champion student involvement, the evolution of research projects into functional self sustaining open source projects, et cetera. And lastly, I am also representing Carlos Matzan and Stephanie Leigh G, who could not be here today. They are essentially my bosses, the people who founded both our Ospo and that really grew out of another research center called the Center for Research on Open Source Software. So they are really the heavy lifters of most of the work that I'll be talking about today. And no way do I get to take credit for it. I really just get to be the messenger who celebrates some of the outcomes of a lot of this work. So before I talk specifically about the types of pairings that we have experience with in terms of mentorship with students, I wanted to zoom out and kind of frame the context of our Ospo and how we operate. So really our goal is to cultivate relationships between these various stakeholders in the academic open source setting. So Carlos likes to use this coral reef metaphor, coral reef being a great example of something that's like a living sort of organism ecosystem where there's a symbiotic relationship between everything that's living there. So this would be sort of representing a healthy open source project. Within this broader picture, we have sponsors who engage with our researchers and with students sometimes through funding, sometimes through mentorship. Funding is the big one. You can see that here. We also have scientists. So these are folks who are typically based at UC Santa Cruz, maybe a postdoc, a faculty member or graduate student. And then lastly, we have students who are making contributions to the projects that we are hosting. As I was making these slides, I also noticed that the word excited appears in all three categories. So hopefully that just conveys the level of like excitement in our open source office about this kind of work. Yeah. So I'm going to really focus on this part, the students and the scientists, since they're the ones that are really like doing the work to grow these communities. So a bit more about the Center for Research and Open Source Software, thinking even broader than our model. This research center has been around since 2015, actually, so long before I came to our office. And although we're now in Ospo, we were not always in Ospo. So this is kind of where it started. Crosse started to bridge the gap between these student projects and open source ecosystems and to really amplify research impact through that. This center was sustained by annual memberships, also by an initial gift from an alum who had done some really groundbreaking work on stuff, founded, you know, develop stuff. No big deal. So our websites there, if you want to find out more about Crosse as a research center. And then you'll see that a lot of the goals of Crosse have sort of rolled into our Ospo. So again, this was sort of the preliminary model for Crosse, which our Ospo is founded upon. So there's these three pillars of work, really education, research and our incubator. And all of these are interfacing both with industry or government, and also with faculty and students at UC Santa Cruz. A little bit more on those different pillars of work that we do. So on the education front, we teach students to engage in open source communities productively. And I would say that the main way that we do this is through an open source programming class. So this again has also been around now for over five years, quite a while, and has taken different forms and is taught by different people with different approaches. But it's always about supporting students making contributions to real projects. In terms of research, we support a variety of funded pathways for faculty, undergraduate and graduate students to sort of like spawn new projects or build their research projects to be open source. And then lastly, this incubator piece helps really provide resources for those projects once they've been created to grow into self sustaining communities. So there's a lot of text on this side. This is just a kind of a summary of takeaways from this era, the pre Ospo era that informed really the envisioning and the brainstorming behind rolling into an Ospo. So some of these lessons were that these successful projects, in addition to being great in the academic setting are also really powerful catalyst for engaging with industry partners. We also found that having open source programs like some of the ones I'm going to talk more about today are really good for engaging a more diverse cross section of students in computer science and programming. And then we also had some takeaways from these different stakeholders that I mentioned earlier. So sponsors really seem to be interested in the research outcomes of these projects for one. The fellows. So that's PhD students and postdocs have really good ideas and are really good mentors to other students. And they're also good ambassadors for open source practices because they're really like in the projects developing the code themselves. And lastly, other this just as students, but really what this is talking about is undergraduate students. These are the contributors who are seeding new open source communities and prototypes. And they really want to learn how to engage with these. So that breadth of activities that came out of that era seemed better suited to rolling into an Ospo. So our Ospo platform now allows us to attract a lot more different kinds of collaboration and is made possible by funding through the Sloan Foundation who's also funding some other academic ospos. And this really has set the stage for us to do more different kinds of mentorship work. Okay, so now the rest of the talk is going to focus on the mentorship work. So now that you have a little bit of context about our office, I'm going to talk about the different ways that we bring together students and mentors, which happens primarily through summer programming so far. But we're starting to expand that into the school year. So as I think most people know by now open source is really lacking in diversity. 10 years ago at a conference, I would put up lots of charts and need to make a case for this. But I was recently at a panel where somebody said, you know, really at the heart of it is that you can't train for lived experience, which I thought was just like a really brilliant gem of a way to sum up why why care about this sort of work. So, you know, you can hire somebody and you can teach them a new programming language. But if we want to have a diverse workforce and diverse perspectives, it's really important to start with education and mentorship. So sort of combined with my experience and broadening participation and teaching and supporting novices. We've been working on some of these well, I've been supporting existing programs and growing some new ones. So this picture was actually from the first time I ever mentored students and open source, I didn't know anything about it. But I still had a blast. So I'm going to talk about different ways that we cultivate these relationships. And I think that there's a lot of reasons that this is really important. So if somebody is coming to open source through one of these experiences, it's really going to color whether or not they want to continue to engage an open source, most likely. So I think of these as like really critical moments where you can have like a really, really good impact on someone that you're working with. But there is also some caution warranted that you want to at least, you know, at worst case, maybe have a neutral experience. So it is good to be mindful of the students experience throughout this. And I think that this is so important, because this can help improve retention, both during the actual mentorship defined length of that relationship, but also impact whether a student wants to continue to engage in a project past that time period. And the project's benefit from student engagement, students benefit because they're getting skill sets. The project's advanced, the ecosystems grow sounds great, right? Really easy. So at least those are some reasons to get involved, even if the work is, there's work along the way. So I am preparing for this talk, kind of distilled the types of programs that we have into three different kinds of mentorship experiences. So these could kind of be called matchmaking approaches. I think they're a little bit more like a mentorship approach. But same theme here. So these are not like exhaustive or official, but ways that I think is helpful to think about this. And I think all of these take different kinds of support, but all can be successful. So I'm going to talk more about these three approaches. One, the first one is called bi-directional. So by this, I mean a situation where a student and a mentor are choosing to work with one another. So a really great example of this that many people are familiar with is Google Summary of Code, where students and mentors choose each other through a sort of matching process where students submit proposals to work on projects that are reviewed by mentors, and then the students are ranked sort of in order of priority to be accepted for that pairing. Some other examples of these types of bi-directional mentorship experiences, I would say are like institution-based student research experiences where a student and a faculty member are deciding deliberately to work with one another. And some industry-based internships work this way as well. Our biggest program in this space, which is also our biggest impact program overall, is called the open source research experience. And this is a summer program that has been running for several years now. And it grew out of Google Summary of Code, or that model. So this takes place for 10 to 12 weeks over the summer. It is fully remote. And our website, which this QR code leads to, maintains a list of our research projects that students can get involved with. And we find that having that list up all the time is really helpful for, in general, helping students generate ideas and see what is a defined amount of work on an open source research project and really start to envision getting involved. And these are all research projects, as I mentioned, so all academic research projects. Some of them are incubator projects. And so students are typically also getting research experience, which is very appealing to many undergraduate students. So as I mentioned, this project was built on the Google Summary of Code model. So we used GSOC, both as inspiration and a blueprint for how we do a lot of the matching to form these mentorship relationships. So I mentioned a little bit about that structure already. The only thing I would add is that we've added a little bit more like scaffolding throughout that process, which many organizations do who work with GSOC. So we require students to join a Slack channel, well before any deadlines and start getting to know potential mentors, and to discuss project ideas well before they're even writing a proposal. So this minimizes the amount of time that students are investing if like, it's not going to be a good match, you would be able to find that out before a student spent a really long time working on a proposal. So, so yeah, we have students joining the team, the Slack team, they get to know mentors, they submit proposals, and then our mentors rank those students in order that they would like to work with them. And we still have been able to benefit from partnering with GSOC and that we have often in many years been a mentor organization. So they provide some funding and infrastructure for us. Since our initial sort of creating OSRE, which started as essentially just our version of GSOC, we've expanded engagement to also include more sponsors. So some of these are industry sponsors. The National Science Foundation also funds some of our projects now. And this allows us to include more local students. GSOC attracts a really global audience, which is really, really cool in some ways, but attracting local students allows them to continue to have like a faculty relationship that persists beyond the summer that they're working on a project. So they might continue working through the academic year together. And let's see. And then, oh, lastly, we're still yet continuing to grow OSRE to include some targeted initiatives. So I mentioned NSF funding. One of those is this year, we're launching a summer of reproducibility, which is funding additional students to work on reproducibility open source research projects. And we're also launching a partnership with a historically black university that will be able to offer mentorship to some of their students as well. So I've just been dumping a lot of information about how we're structured. So I wanted to zoom out and give a little bit of a timeline just so that if you're thinking about working with students in this sort of way, you can see it just takes a long time unless you have a big team or a lot of resources. But we've been really successful at this. So as I mentioned, we started out as a GSoc mentor organization. Some time later, a couple years later when the pandemic hit, that really became this bigger program OSRE, the open source research experience, with more sponsors. And since then, we've brought in to include other UC campuses, and introduced these more targeted initiative programs. And in terms of contributor growth or participation, if you think back to the coral reef example, I've used little fish here to show how many students we've had involved at all these different stages. So started out with just two students through Google summer of code. And now we've expanded to 37 students that we're going to be working with this summer. And that again, will be funded by a variety of funding sources at this point with lots of different kinds of mentorship. I do want to emphasize because these numbers are like, impressive or not, depending on your frame of reference, that I think these numbers are really high, because what we're doing is very high touch mentorship. So what I'm talking about is like one on one relationships with someone you are meeting with, like every week on zoom, and you're talking with them on Slack throughout the week. So these are like very tight pairings that people are working together. And each mentor is going to have no more than two or three students per summer. So it's smaller, even than a lot of like, research groups that you might find graduate students participating in. The last thing I want to mention about this program evolution is we have a student who's a fantastic example of how students can start with a program like this and grow into different roles. And that is that we have a graduate, a current graduate student who came to our program in 2019 as a GSOC student from a different country outside the US. And that student because of their participation, and their relationship that they developed with their mentor ended up applying to UC Santa Cruz for graduate school, immediately standing out in the pool of applicants because of this faculty relationship, their research experience, and has become an extremely well regarded and valuable current graduate student at UCSC who went on to become a maintainer of the project they worked on, and also to then mentor other students who are then contributing to that project. So that's not going to happen with everybody. But it's like a really motivating example, I think, of how if you invest in people, they can really grow and get back to your organization. These are just the obligatory, you know, sponsors that are actually very important for us running our program. So these are some of the funders that have really helped us to do this work in addition to Google Summer of Code. And we are still trying to grow more. And we're also working with national labs as well. Okay, so that talked about this bi-directional sort of student and mentor choose one another way of mentoring students. The next kind of pairing that I want to touch on is when an instructor or mentor chooses a community for a student or students to work with. So in this situation, there could be somebody who's like guiding the students, but also a secondary level of mentorship from an open source community. So some examples of this are an undergraduate course where all students are contributing to the same project or community. So this is how I've taught open source when I taught at the college level. And this can be really effective if you work ahead of time to build relationships with the leaders in those communities. It does not work as well to just show up and dump 30 students in a community with no direction. So but building these relationships ahead of time can really make it a rich experience for everyone involved. This also affords the students two layers of mentorship so they can come to you if they're looking for general guidance on like open source norms, what's appropriate, like sort of getting pumped up to like submit a PR if they get to that point. But they're also going to get really specific mentorship from people within the community that you are having them work with. So another example of this would be a cohort intensive program, which could be something that's run very similar to a course in some ways. I'm thinking one example of this is GitHub's All-in initiative ran kind of this way in the first year, I think, where they had a cohort of students who built community with one another. And then also we're working in an open source project. So we too have been inspired by some of these efforts and another program we're developing right now is in this cohort space. So there's a lot of great programs out there already, like Outreachy, GitHub's All-in initiative, Major League Hacking has student fellowships. And we are sort of riding on this cohort model more heavily to specifically invite and support more diverse students in our projects. So we are already, as I mentioned, doing really well because of our GSOC involvement with having students from all over the world, which is extraordinarily valuable. But in this case, we're trying to really build more relationships with students with the United States for more diverse backgrounds. So we set out to do this by building partnerships both on campus and beyond campus with folks who share similar interests and have expertise that's complementary. So we are working with our campus Student Success Program for African Black and Caribbean students to partner to serve HBCU students this summer. We're also working directly with the university that students will be joining us from and with a faculty member there who's been advising us. And we also, thirdly, are working with another partner on campus that's focused on inclusive excellence in engineering and they're helping us with the funding for this. And in this case, the matchmaking, I'm sort of leading development on this program. The matchmaking is going to be this sort of instructor or mentor led model where I will be finding community or communities for students to work with based on relationships that I've sort of already formed or communities that I have vetted. So if that's something you're interested in supporting students, you can also talk to me about that. So that was sort of our motivation and how we went about this. This is the program that's shaping up right now. It's called the OSRE Catalyst Program because we hope that this program will help serve as an on ramp for, again, more diverse students, students who maybe don't have any experience at all with open source but are curious to learn. So this program really was designed out of conversations with faculty at our HBCU partner school about what their students wanted to have more access to you or what they could gain from partnering with us, what we could offer them. So some things that came out of that were a program that offered a cohort model so where students could build a small micro community. Also a program that would allow students to be in person for some period of time. It's been really, really different for people to work and collaborate remotely over the past few years. So we took that into consideration and a more intensive mentoring component in some ways than our existing remote summer program has. So the catalyst program is going to be an eight week program with four weeks spent with us and Santa Cruz on campus. So I'm really excited. I'll be seeing students every day, Monday through Friday for that four weeks. We'll be learning about a lot of stuff I teach in an open source class. So learning about community norms and how to get started and some of it's a little bit more like how do you have a mindset to really approach open source with the growth mindset, get through the stuff that's hard or different than traditional CS classes. And then the rest of the program, students are going to work remotely to sort of mimic the format of our other programs. And we're calling this the catalyst program because we hope that it's going to lead to more students being interested in exploring, contributing to a project of their choosing or maybe applying to our remote program in the future. And we're also hoping to expand the eligibility for this program to include other students self identifying as my normalized within tech. So the last kind of like a matchmaking or really mentorship approach that I'll mention just briefly is a what I would call like a student driven approach. So this could be where a student just says, Hey, I'm curious about open source. And their instructor or mentor says, cool, go find a project. Good luck. You know, and sometimes that works out. Sometimes that can absolutely work out. But this is really looking at students being very motivated to drive their own learning experience. And another way that this can happen that we do leverage as well at UCSE is in an undergraduate course where students choose the projects they're contributing to. So they would have more support here than if they were working totally on their own. But they're still really in the driver seat of their experience getting to know open source contribution. So yes, as I mentioned, we have one of these courses actually running right now by the other postdoc who's letting students choose their project. So I think, yeah, as I said, this I think that this approach is interesting because it's harder to keep up with all the different projects that your students might be working on if you're teaching. But they're typically very motivated. So my last sort of editorial comment on all of this is that although all of these can be really successful approaches, I do think that there's sort of differences and like the type of investment that they require to have positive student engagement that can lead to something longer term. And loosely, I think that these sort of bi-directional one on one or one to two or three student pairings tend to be the most labor intensive. But I also think that they form really lasting long term relationships. Whereas more student driven approach might take less investment from you up front as an instructor or a mentor, but and can offer students a taste of that experience. But I've seen that be a little bit more distributed whether students continue out of a out of an experience like that. So we need more programs like this. And I think that a lot of the representation at this conference is from industry ospos. And so, you know, one thing I think I could say there is that we think it would be really cool for industry ospos to consider partnering with local universities on projects like this because you have the ability to really offer a lot in terms of things that students are looking for. This sort of mentorship can tie into teaching. It can tie into student programming, like our summer program. It can be as small as like a workshop mentorship workshop. So yeah, so these I won't go through all of these. It's a lot of just text in detail, but the infrastructure needs are not tremendous. It looks like a lot on the slide. I wanted people to have our notes. But you really need a point person, a program manager of some sort. You need a way to compensate students who are participating, which we believe is really, really important to do. And a funding source. And then you need mentors. So the mentors, you know, I think are really the golden resource in these projects. So finding good mentors can really take you far. So yeah, you can just start somewhere, start small. We started with two students through GSOC. You can apply to be a mentor organization for an existing program as a way to start. And then, you know, find experts to advise you and scale essentially as much as you have the resources to support. I wanted to leave you with some really awesome memes that my students made. I think that working with students can take a lot of effort to be like a really good mentor in a really holistic way. But I love working with students and I love everything I learned from them and also just how fun they are to work with. So if anyone has questions, I would love to talk more. That's a really great question. So the question I'll just repeat it was for our OSRE program, the one that's new this year, that is a combination of in-person and remote. How does that work with like visas? Right. And what kind of visa would it require? So the answer to that is that we actually, this is the first year we're running the program and so we haven't expanded the eligibility criteria for it yet to include a really broad range of students. That's our vision for the future. But for this year, we're starting with just one partner institution that's an HBCU. And then from that, we're going to look at how to grow. So I don't know yet, but it's a great question that you ask because it's nice to know if that's something that would be interesting to other people. Exactly. Yeah, but that's something we could definitely think about for the future. Yeah, that's a great question. So what about our other programs who's eligible for those? So our sort of OSRE classic or the original OSRE is fully distributed around the world. You can apply from any country as long as it's not a country that we have a current embargo with, a US embargo. So yeah, so actually most of our contributors through that program are not from the US, which is challenging in terms of like setting up meetings and that kind of thing. You know, people have to find a rhythm when you're working with like, you know, one student and like, you know, South America and another student in Africa, like another student in like South Asia, you know, that takes some creative thinking. But I also think that the perspective that comes in from working with those students is super cool. I'm going to be working with the student from India this summer. And like her proposal just was incredible. All the ideas she had and different experience that informed them. Yeah, other questions? Yeah, so the question was about resources that I would recommend. Are you interested in resources for like supporting new contributors or for becoming an Ospo? Okay, so academic Ospos. Yeah, I think that there's probably more going on even than I'm aware of. But I do know that there's a working group called Ospo plus plus that's not all academic but has a subset of academic participants. I think there's gosh, I'm trying to think how we meet. There's a group of academic Ospos that are all funded by this Sloan Foundation funding call that's out and is taking additional submissions or I think they're done for this year. But in the future, that's a great place to look to you. But yeah, Ospo plus plus I think probably is a good starting point because they've had some guest speakers on topics like this and I think they might have recorded some of some of those sessions. Yeah, that's a great question. So kind of who owns these projects, like who who's maintaining these projects that are involved in our programs. So it started out really just as UCSC research projects. So everything was like being maintained by a faculty member or a grad student at UCSC. We do now have expanded to include all other University of California campuses. So that's a broader range of research projects. There are also projects that certainly have industry partnership, but I think that there's still projects that are largely based at Santa Cruz. I could be wrong about that though, but we welcome, you know, industry involvement, for sure. And we're in a great place for it being so close to Silicon Valley, like projects for students to work with. Like, do you mean like communities beyond necessarily like research projects? Yeah. Yeah, so I can speak to the question was about other communities or projects that we have experience with, correct me if I'm wrong, beyond necessarily our research projects. So I can add that my personal experience, again, I come to this really as an educator, is that there's there is a working group of faculty who teach with open source and they sort of informally have like their ear to the ground on communities that are really welcoming for newcomers. So when I taught open source at Berea College, I actually sent an email to the teaching open source mailing list, which is very like low traffic, high value, if you're interested in teaching. I sent an email that was like, help, I was going to use this community, but like, they totally pivoted like they're doing different stuff now. And I got emails back that at that point said, well, Mozilla Firefox DevTools community has been welcoming students from other schools. So, you know, maybe consider that. So I ended up actually having regular calls with two other faculty members, my first term teaching open source, who already had built bridges into that community. And it was such a valuable experience for my students because of that they had kind of vetted that this was a welcoming community for students. And the one other thing I'll mention is that there's sort of in the research space, faculty who are doing work with humanitarian projects specifically, and research on those as a way to potentially draw more diverse students to open source because of the social impact of focus. So that's been really helpful as well. But yeah, there's no like official list. It would be great if there was but it changes all the time. So but it's something that's a great thing to think about. Yeah. All right, I think we're out of time. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Thank you all for coming.