*tl;dr:* I’d like to apply for a PSF grant to mentor several developers towards becoming active contributors and hopefully core-devs.
- What do you think? Any +1/-1 would be very helpful.
- I'm looking for info on how successful mentoring has been in getting more contributors. Any such info or references would be a great help!
Recently there has been a recent "wave" of requests for mentoring on this list. This was triggered by Victor Stinner’s post "Looking for people from underrepresented groups to mentor" <https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/core-mentorship@python.org/message/Z33DZF7C4YXUD2SMHVHUZDN25I3FCNGP/>, who later wrote that he received 20-30 requests for mentoring <https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/core-mentorship@python.org/message/W3IEAEQQBXTC663SFES52XLIMPKBAWJB/> (!).
My understanding is that many of us would like to have more active contributors and core developers. Additionally, many would like these to be a more diverse group. Guido and Victor have lately taken up mentoring several developers with the explicit intent of achieving these goals.
I would also like to work towards these goals. I have recently invested more time on the core-mentorship mailing list and Zulip stream, as well as doing my best to mentor two promising developers. However, my free time is becoming increasingly limited again, and I am learning that effectively mentoring a developer requires being able to spend a good amount of time nearly daily on such mentoring.
My life circumstances are such that I would be able to commit to a medium-term part-time paid project. Therefore, I’ve come up with an idea for a concerted effort to mentor a group of developers for a significant length of time, which I’ve called a “Core Dev Mentorship Program”.
My current suggestion is to remotely mentor five developers for 10 weeks, selecting the participants to be as diverse a group as possible among appropriate applicants. I wrote a proposal and submitted it to the PSF. They rightly asked that I first bring this before the core devs, so here I am.
I can think of reasons to oppose such a project, with the foremost being that most (all?) such mentorship has thus far been done on a volunteer basis, and we wouldn’t want to negatively impact future volunteer mentorship efforts. In my eyes this project would be a complementary effort, and I propose it only because it appears that we are currently unable to mentor as many as we would like, nor as many as would like to be mentored.
I am purposefully not including the details of my proposal, as I would like to first focus on whether the idea is supported in general.
Any and all comments, suggestions and criticism are most welcome.
Note: I also posted this in the "commiters" category on <https://discuss.python.org/t/suggestion-a-psf-grant-for-running-a-core-dev-mentorship-program/289> discuss.python.org; see additional discussion there.