Nextcloud include - transparency report

[jan]

Hi @Halle_Luja yes there is activity, sparse but steady. Our Include application form keeps being always open (unfortunately recently it has been plagued with a bunch of AI generated applications).

We also more generally always have a travel support program for each of our conferences and contributor weeks, with the info listed under “travel support” on the conf page.

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There are also 2 amazing success stories which happened since my last update and I’m happy to share. In my previous post I mentioned:

@jan

At the moment I’m starting to mentor one person, where no funds are spent yet though.

This was referring to @nimishavijay, who is part of our design team since a long time now! She is also active within the Open Source Design community and a coach with Superbloom. You can listen to an interview with Nimisha on our podcast.

Then in late 2022, @hamza221 applied to Include and soon after became a part of the Groupware team, where he now works on Mail, Calendar and Contacts. (Hamza, we need to schedule a podcast with you )

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In both cases, no funds were spent as it was an organic flow from Include application to mentoring to internship to hiring. So my core points from the previous post still mostly stand:

@jan

• Some of the candidates just end up being contributors, for whom we have the bespoke contributor travel support program where we fund 80%. If they fall into that, it will be reimbursed by Nextcloud GmbH directly instead of Include.
• The plan is to spend the money on travel funding to get the people to our events they could not otherwise attend.

And lastly, the reason for blogging more about it is because of the last point in my previous post:

@jan

We need to do better outreach work to get more candidates. This is a bit impeded by the fact that I’m the only person in the organization team so far. I think we need to link this up more with marketing so before the events we give enough advance notice, and do regular blog posts and tweets etc.

So it’s good that we are making more noise about this so more potential contributors can see this and get an opportunity.

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@Halle_Luja

Or do you have any recommendations for institutions or projects that promote diversity in the FOSS field?

And to reply to your point from your previous post: While with Open Source Diversity itself we stopped taking donations as we basically don’t have any organizational costs, I recommend looking into the projects listed on the page as there are probably lots of them who are happy to take donations.

Thank you, and I hope this explains a bit more and gives a little update on our Include initiative.

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For anyone interested, you can apply to Nextcloud Include at Nextcloud Include - Supporting diversity in open source