Improving communication

After my last post, a lot of things happened, but what I'm going to talk about now is the thing that I believe had the most impact in improving my experience with the Outreachy internship: the changes that were made in communication, specially between me and my mentors.

When I struggled with the tasks, with moving forward, it was somewhat a wish of mine to change the ways I communicate with my mentors. (Alright, Renata, so why didn't you start by just doing that? Well, I wasn't sure where to begin.)

I didn't know how to propose something like that to my mentors, I mean... maybe that was how Outreachy was supposed to be and I just might have set different expectations? The first step to figure this out I took by reaching Anna, an Outreachy intern with Wikimedia who I'd been talking to since the interns announcement had been made.

I asked her about how she interacted with her mentors and how often, so I knew what I could ask for. She told me about her weekly meetings with her mentors and how she could chat direcly with them when she ran into some issues. And, indeed, I felt like things like that what I wanted to happen.

Before I could reach out and discuss this with my mentors, though, Daniel himself read last week's post and brought up the idea of us speaking on the phone for the first time. That was indeed a good experience and I told him I would like to repeat or establish some sort of schedule to communicate with each other.

Yes, well, a schedule would be the best improvement, I think. It's not just about the means (phone call or IRC, for instance) that we communicate, but to know that, at some point, either one per week or bi-weekly, there would be someone to talk to at a determined time so I could untie any knots that were created during my internship (if that makes sense). I know I could just send an email at any time to my mentors (and sometimes I do) and they would reply, but that's not quite the point.

So, to make this short: I started to talk to one of my mentors daily and it's been really helpful. We are working on a schedule for bi-weekly calls. And we always have e-mails. I'm glad to say that now I talk not just with mentors, but also with fellow brazilian Outreachers and former participants and everyone is willing to help out.

For all the ways to reach me, you can look up my Debian wiki profile.