Ascend seeks to include underaddressed populations in FOSS

Mozilla has rolled out a mentorship and education program called the Ascend Project that is designed to reach out to populations that are typically under-represented in open source development. But Ascend differs from existing outreach efforts like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and GNOME's Outreach Program for Women (OPW) in several respects—including who it targets and how the mentorship and instruction are delivered. Ascend has already opened the invitation for its first round of participants, who will attend a six-week, full-time training course in Portland, Oregon in September.

Lukas Blakk publicly announced the launch of the initiative in March. Noticing how many "developer boot camps" were popping up, Blakk said, she had the idea to:

Blakk had attended an open-source training program while at Seneca College, but one of the core concepts behind Ascend is to make similar training accessible to people who are not in college or who, for other reasons, cannot afford to retrain for a new job. Consequently, the program was envisioned from the outset to provide a daily honorarium to attendees to lessen the impact of missing work, as well as a laptop to keep upon completing the course, and amenities like complementary meals, transit passes, and childcare services.

Mozilla's management approved the plan in December 2013, and the team set out to plan the pilot program. The initial course will be held at Mozilla's offices in Portland; a second round is tentatively planned for early 2015 in New Orleans. The pilot round will be limited to 20 participants; according to a May 30 post on the project site, applications will be accepted through June 30. Subsequently, the project team will work through several steps to narrow down the field to the final 20.

The course will be full-time instruction, five days a week, for six weeks, with the goal being to eventually have students "getting to committed code in production". Blakk noted in the original announcement that there will be a certain level of technical competence expected of attendees at the beginning, such as the ability to complete a free online course in JavaScript development, and that applicants will be asked to supply essays and other application materials that establish their interest and problem-solving ability.

So far the details of the curriculum have not been posted, either on the project site or in its GitHub repository. But the About page indicates that the goal is to address general-purpose FOSS project practices, such as "IRC, bug trackers, code review, version control, creating & committing patches" rather than (for example) sticking to a Mozilla-oriented curriculum that covered web development. The project is currently looking for volunteers in the Portland area who can serve as in-class helpers or as "drop-in" volunteers to help participants on a less formal basis.

The outreach landscape

One might ask how Ascend fits into the larger picture of developer-training programs (including GSoC and OPW). In a June 20 blog post, Blakk expanded further on how Ascend is intended to differ from these other outreach efforts—saying that many of them target school-age children or teenagers, but that "the REAL problem to solve is how to get adult women (and other underrepresented people) re-trained, supported and encouraged to take on roles in technology NOW."

Indeed, the biggest training programs in the FOSS arena these days do tend to aim for students who have yet to enter the workforce. GSoC is the largest, and it is an outreach opportunity that focuses exclusively on college students, while Google's related Code-in program targets high-school students. OPW is open to post-college-age women, although it, too, is structured around a more-or-less semester-length internship of three months, during which the participant is expected to work full time. Ascend's six-week course may still require attendees to rearrange their work schedule—and six weeks is certainly a lengthy leave of absence from most jobs—but it is ostensibly easier to manage than twelve weeks.

Consequently, Ascend is already appealing to a different segment of potential new FOSS contributors by focusing on finding participants who cannot pursue college computer science studies. The fact that it encourages applications from people in several distinct groups of under-represented communities (ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ community) is also atypical. The software industry as whole, after all, is often noted for how it skews toward the Caucasian male demographic.

That said, Ascend cannot necessarily expect to be overwhelmed by students unless it finds ways to advertise and promote its courses outside of the avenues dominated by those who are already in the software industry (and FOSS in particular). Such a chicken-and-egg problem confronts FOSS in many outreach and evangelism efforts, of course, and easy solutions to them are scarce. Mozilla certainly has a global reach and wide "brand awareness," both of which should help matters.

Reaching out to underemployed individuals is a factor that Ascend does have in common with both OPW and GSoC, both of which pay stipends to their participants. In contrast, the "boot camp" model Blakk referred to in the initial announcement is composed largely of schools that charge attendees tuition and fees, rather than paying them. While that may make for a good re-training option, it essentially limits enrollment to those individuals who already have sufficient means to retrain themselves.

Ascend also differs in that it appears to be designing a rather broad curriculum, focusing on general-purpose development practices. The "boot camp" model tends to focus on a particular technology stack, while the GSoC/OPW model connects participants with individual, existing software projects. Ultimately, of course, most members of the FOSS community know that it can take quite some time and interaction with quite a few people for a newcomer to join the open-source development community in a full-time capacity. A course like Ascend's is the first, but not the only, step. With the potential to reach interested participants who are not within the mission of the other outreach efforts, though, Ascend has the opportunity to help many new people take that first step.

[Thanks to Paul Wise.]