Integrating mentoring into an open source community that welcomes and values new contributors

Time: 
07/23/2015 - 13:00-07/23/2015 - 13:45
Room: 
Room E1
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Session Track: 

Business and Strategy

The purpose of this track is two-fold - one angle helps you to understand the advantages of Drupal from an organizational leadership angle and the other is to highlight the great Drupal sites and projects you're working on and to show what's possible. These sessions are business focused, and will be non-technical.

Speaker(s): 

Summary

This session will talk about how to get integrate mentoring into all the different layers of an open source project. This involves a change in the whole community which treats new contributors with respect, knowing they have something valuable to contribute to the project.

Description

Using the Drupal community as an example, we will look at the many ways mentoring fits into all the experience layers of an open source project.

Mentoring can take on many aspects: helping new contributors make their first contribution to an open source project, helping contributors make contributions in areas new to them, helping people move from contributing to mentoring others, and helping people move to leading initiatives.

We will look at removing barriers to contribution, contribution tools, contribution documentation, structured office hours, in person events, and using the issue queue. And how mentoring can change from something structured to something that happens as a matter of habit for lots of people. It evolves into an underlying habit of valuing new contributors within the whole project.