Cheryl, thanks for starting this thread and for helping to find easy issues to be worked on.
I'm sympathetic to wanting to have tasks for the PyCon sprints, but at
the same time it feels exclusionary to "save" them from people who want
to volunteer at other times. Having paid to attend PyCon shouldn't be a
barrier or a privilege for contributing (though it's certainly a
smoother road by having contributors there to assist, which is why other
conferences/sprints are keen to have core developers attend as mentors).
I understand your concern, but I hope people understand that the mentored sprint is a little bit different than the regular sprint days.
The target audience of the mentored sprint are folks who are underrepresented minorities, in my personal experience, they are less privileged to begin with.
We want to be inclusive, and therefore we're encouraging those who are not from underrepresented group to bring along someone else from underrepresented group with them.
The mentored sprint is taking place during the main conference days, and looking at the signups, most of the participants have told us they want to sprint for 4 hours on Saturday afternoon.
This means they will be missing out on lots of quality talks happening at the same time which they paid for.
Our goal is really to make contributing more accessible by paring them up with mentors, but without straightforward issues to be worked on, they can't continue effectively.
The issues that's been earmarked for the mentored sprint are so far documentation and typo fixes and not urgent issues.
I don't believe that we're "stealing away" opportunity to contribute from those who weren't able to come to PyCon, but I understand that point of view.
In any case, I'm appreciative to those who have helped find issues to be worked on the mentored sprint, and I also understand that I can't (and won't) stop other people from working on these issues before the sprint at PyCon.
While I'm here, I'd like to invite you all to participate in the mentored sprint if you can. Help spread the word, or sign up to mentor.
I'm a little busy with PyCascades until next Monday, but after that I'll be happy to answer any questions about the mentored sprint.