I’m currently a mentor for a design internship for an OSS. I can speak on my experience, if that helps OSD form their own design internship.
The internship is focused on making Real Time Collaboration (RTC) tools more accessible. The long-term goal is to take these findings and make JupyterLab’s RTC more accessible.
The internship work itself is more about user research than visuals. Focused on gathering the pain points of current RTC disabled user experience. Our intern conducted interviews and audits with volunteers. The volunteers were a mix of OSS developers and from the disabled community.
The end-result will be a written document with these findings. With the 3 month span of the internship, there’s isn’t time to implement these findings. However, we want to spread these findings and help OSS developers make more accessible OSS. One possibility is that these findings be implemented and work in tandem with JupyterLab accessibility grant.
Set-up:
- 1 hour meeting once a week
- 3 months long
- 2 co-mentors and 1 mentee
- Remote
- Compensation: $1000 USD/month (for full-time at 40 hrs/wk) - our intern is a student and part-time
How the internship was set-up:
- Quansight (my employer) has an internship program, and each internship is with an Python OSS project (such as NumPy, conda, etc).
- There’s been more focus recently in having non-code internships! In the application, it states “We are also actively working on the technical writing design, and accessibility spaces and welcome applications from folks interested in these areas.”
- In this case, we have a company as a middleman between the projects and interns.
- There is an Internship Coordinator who reviewed and interviewed applicants before matching with an existing internship opportunity.
- Unusually, in this case, a UX/UI student approached the company about doing an internship. At the time, we didn’t have a design internship available. But our Internship Coordinator asked a designer at Quansight and we made one, based on JupyterLab’s accessibility aims.
- So a design internship was created by an intern asking for one, but there was a larger framework to move that forward (company internship program). I don’t think the internship may been created with a less direct request or existing internship framework, such as a forum post in an OSS project.
I could speak more about this in the next OSD monthly call, if anyone’s interested. I was at this month’s call and saw the recent agenda on internships, which led me here. 