Mentorship in other FLOSS projects§

Asheesh Laroia <paulproteus@debian.org>

Goals of this session§

• 25 min interactive lecture
• 20 min BoF

GNOME Love, 2004§

• Recommendations for first contributions
• "the GnomeLove project also features [a] mailing list"
• 2005: Add Bugzilla tag
• 2005: Run first IRC event

Concerns:

• Who is their audience?
• Can they tell if it's working?

Google Summer of Code, 2005§

• Emphasis: bringing new students in
• DiBona: "something like 30 percent of the students stuck with their groups past SoC"
• Strong relationship between mentor and mentee
• Goal-oriented, time-limited
• Resilient to student failure?
• Resilient to mentor failure?

GNOME Women's Summer Oureach Program, 2006§

• 181 applicants for GSoC
• 0% women
• 100 applications for WSOP
• 6 chosen
• Goal-oriented, time-limited
• Lesson: outreach works

GNOME Outreach Program for Women (2010+)§

• Marina Zhuarakinskaya revives it
• First, creates mentor list
• More frequent (2x yearly), but with breaks
• Pushes people toward GSoC
• 37 participants; 9 GNOME, 7 in kernel
• 7/7 land patches in Linux
• Lesson: Directed mentorship works
• Resilient to mentor failure?

Four Days by Asheesh§

• Debconf 2010, "Debian for Shy People"
• Asheesh returns from Debconf, excited
• debian-mentors always seemed lonely...
• ...four day goal for responses.

Lessons:

• Volunteers and empty promises...
• Set up measurement first.

2010: Open Source Comes to Campus§

• Held at University of Pennsylvania
• 30% of applicants were women
• and 30% of most excited applicants!
• so, 30% of attendees
• No gender-specific outreach

Fedora Design Bounties§

• Show an example
• See also, Starling bounties.

Wikipedia Teahouse (2012)§

• "a social cafe-like space that might help support more new editors on-wiki"
• "reaching out to new editors on-wiki to personally invite them"
• Strategy: Many to many
• Show a sample answered question on front page
• Goals + measurements: mean time to first response

Wikipedia Teahouse (results)§

Participants...

• Edit 10x number of articles
• Make 7x more global edits
• 2x of their content survives
• ~40 users per week
• Are ~300% as likely to be women
• "users liked the social intro feature and seeing other intros"

Concepts about mentorship programs§

• Open vs. Closed vs. Open with invites
• Builds human connections
• Resilient to mentor/mentee failure
• Whose life becomes better?
• Measuring results
• Goal-oriented, time-limited
• (One|Many)-to-(One|Many)

LibreOffice EasyHacks§

• Keyword on bug tracker
• Also, a wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks

Upstream University§

The mentorship will continue until the patch lands.

Ubuntu Developer Advisory Team§

• Greet new contributors
• Encourage people to apply
• Contact lost contributors
• Source: their homepage, last edited 2012-04-02.

Ubuntu DAT: New Contributor Report§

• DAT asked open-ended questions; 63% response rate
• 9 love Launchpad; 9 dislike it
• Reviews are "surprisingly painless"
• Docs are troublesome: "overwhelmed at all the information" and by "contradictory information" that is "difficult to follow in a logical manner"
• Contributing is a "surprisingly painless process"
• (See also Lucas's similar survey on debian-project.)
• Real magic is in the contributor tracking...

Concepts about mentorship programs§

Concepts:

• Open vs. Closed vs. Open with invites
• Builds human connections
• Resilient to mentor/mentee failure
• Whose life becomes better?
• Measuring results
• Goal-oriented, time-limited
• (One|Many)-to-(One|Many)

Suggestion: Debian Member Encouragement Team