[outreach] GNOME-wide mentors list

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Dear OPW mentors,

Thanks again for all the work you've been doing to help the OPW applicants get up to speed! One thing that makes the program work really well is that we connect the applicants with you, mentors, and you help them with their first contribution. It would be great if we can help all newcomers to GNOME figure out who to ask for help when they work on their first contribution.

In the recent months, Allan, Andre and others have done an amazing job making a consistent and informative set of GNOME Love wiki pages that explain to newcomers how to get started contributing to GNOME. Providing a list of contact people for each project works really well with the rest of the information provided. So to get it started, I've copied the list of mentors for OPW to
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove/Mentors

I really hope that being listed there will help your project and new contributors find each other and will not be overwhelming for you. However, please feel free to remove your name or your project from the list at any point. Please feel free to modify the text for your project and update the mentors list too.

I will blog about this in a day or two, so that more people in the GNOME community can add themselves to the list.

One idea that I recently proposed at the GSoC mentors summit is creating a page on the GSoC wiki with a list of organizations that have mentors who would help new contributors with their first patch any time throughout the year. That way the students will know who to contact to prepare to apply for GSoC. This is particularly important for female students who typically prefer to work on things collaboratively in a social setting, and might not know anyone personally who would encourage them or help them.

Once we have that page ready, we can spread the word about it on different mailing lists for technical women. We can also have a flyer that points to this page and encourages students to prepare for GSoC at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing next weekend. There will be a free and open source software booth at the conference. That way we'll help female students find these resources, while the resources would be available to everyone.

I'm planning to contact people from other GSoC organizations this weekend to ask them to set up and link to similar pages with mentors. I hope these resources and spreading the word about them will result in a greater number of better prepared students, including women, applying for GSoC next year.

Please let me know what you think about this!

Thanks,
Marina