ISA-InterMine: accelerating and rewarding data sharing (360G-Wellcome-208381_Z_17_B)

Diversity amongst staff and students in higher education is still demonstrably unequal, both in gender balance and ethnic balance (https://www.ecu.ac.uk/about-us/he-equality-challenges). Similarly, open source software developers self-report to be over 90% male and 15% or less self-report as BME (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qps53). InterMine, as an open-source biological data warehouse, occupies both the academic and open source worlds. We propose to improve gender and ethnicity balance by mentoring interns from underrepresented backgrounds, helping to improve their software engineering skills. This will allow interns who have an interest in software engineering, academia, and/or data science/ bioinformatics to gain hands-on experience writing code for a project with real-world scientific applications, while working with a team of experienced software developers. Past interns have benefitted in a number of ways: one has gained a first-author paper; some have returned to gain experience of mentoring in subsequent years; we have written them references to support successful applications for graduate education and jobs, and one has gained a full-time post within the InterMine team. We propose that interns will be recruited via Outreachy (https://www.outreachy.org), an organisation dedicated to diversifying the open source community. Outreachy expressly encourages applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. Interns work remotely from May to August, videoconferencing with their mentors once a week and with the entire group of interns and mentors once a month for group workshops covering good coding practices and presentation skills.