While Blockchains Commons has always engaged promising entrants to the community as interns, as of June 2020, the community has taken one step further: prototyping a global team internship collaboration structure.
The path towards this experimental internship collective builds upon early thoughts from Christopher Allen on externships.
After a surge in interest with 2020's summer internship program, we settled on the pathway of collaboration across 7 accepted interns thorough coverage in this July 3 Decrypt Media article.
This first prototype of the global group internship is intended to produce documentation and recommendations for replicating similar collaborative experiments, to further bolster the Free and Open Source [FOSS] software community's capacity to engage and include newcomers.
For this summer project, we are doing our primary synchronous communication via Signal group messages (including posting weekly office hours), HackMD for collaborative writing, and Github for development and project management. We also have guest speakers presenting their Bitcoin ecosystem projects during alternating weeks' office hours.
Each of the current global interns brings their own strengths to the table, as well as their own desires for specific forms of technical and professional learning. Current projects underway can be viewed as issues in the Blockchain Commons Community github repo.