I first learned about Outreachy reading Planet GNOME 10 (or 15?) years ago. At the time, I did not know much about free software and I was puzzled by this initiative, as it mixed politics and software in a way I was not used to.

Now I am a mentor for the December 2025 Outreachy cohort for Papers (aka GNOME Document Viewer), so I figured I would write a blog post to explain what Outreachy is and perpetuate the tradition! Furthermore, I thought it might be interesting to describe my experience as a mentor so far.

What is Outreachy?

Quoting the Outreachy website :

Outreachy provides [paid] internships to anyone from any background who faces underrepresentation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technical industry where they are living.

These internships are paid and carried out in open-source projects. By way of anecdote, it was initially organized by the GNOME community around 2006-2009 to encourage women participation in GNOME and was progressively expanded to other projects later on . It was formally renamed Outreachy in 2015 and is now managed independently on GNOME, apart from its participation as an open-source project.

Compared to the well-funded Summer of Code program by Google, Outreachy has a much more precarious financial situation, especially in recent years . With little surprise, the evolution of politics in the US and elsewhere over the last few years does not help.

Therefore, most internships are nowadays funded directly by open-source projects (in our case the GNOME Foundation, you can donate and become a Friend of GNOME ), and Outreachy still has to finance (at least) its staff ( donations here ).

Outreachy as a Mentor

So, I am glad that the GNOME Foundation was able to fund an Outreachy internship for the December 2025 cohort. As I am one of the Papers maintainers, I decided to volunteer to mentor an intern and came up with a project on document signatures. This was one of the first issues filled when Papers was forked from Evince, and I don't think I need to elaborate on how useful PDF signing is nowadays. Furthermore, Tobias had already made designs for this feature, so I knew that if we actually had an intern, we would precisely know what needed to be implemented ¹ .

Once the GNOME Internship Committee for Outreachy approved the project, the project was submitted on the Outreachy website, and applicants were invited to start making contributions to projects during the month of October so projects could then select interns (and interns could decide whether they wanted to work for three months in this community). Applicants were already selected by Outreachy (303 applications were approved out of 3461 applications received). We had several questions and contributions from around half a dozen applicants, and that was already an enriching experience for me. For instance, it was interesting to see how newcomers to Papers could be puzzled by our documentation.

At this point, a crucial thing was labeling some issues as "Newcomers". It is much harder than what it looks (because sometimes things that seem simple actually aren't), and it is necessary to make sure that issues are not ambiguous, as applicants typically do not dare to ask questions (even, of course, when it is specified that questions are welcomed!). Communication is definitively one of the hardest things.

In the end, I had to grade applicants (another hard thing to do), and the Internship Committee selected Malika Asman who accepted to participate as an intern! Malika wrote about her experience so far in several posts in her blog .