tl;dr: I’d like to apply for a PSF grant to mentor several
developers towards becoming active contributors and hopefully core-devs.
1. What do you think? Any +1/-1 would be very helpful.
2. 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!
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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", who later wrote that he received 20-30 requests for mentoring (!).
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.
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