Mentorship as a Pathway to Open-Source Project Sustainability
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FOSS Backstage 202239 / 39
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Hi everyone, my name is Regina. I'm going to be speaking on mentorship as a pathway for open source sustainability. I am currently serving as the Vice President and Board of Directors at the GNOME Foundation. I'm a software engineer and also a founder of Prana Initiative.
00:24
For this talk, I'm going to be touching a little bit on a brief of introduction. I'm going to be talking about the role of mentorship in OIS projects. I'm going to be discussing common OIS programmes, using it as a context for this talk, and success stories as well, challenges of identifying mentors, mentor's challenges,
00:45
and then strategies for identifying and supporting mentors. To begin this talk, I will be starting with a quote that was done by Denzil Washington. He said, show me a successful individual, I will show you someone who had a positive influence in his or her life.
01:09
He said, I do not care whatever you're living, if you don't breathe well, I'm sure. I think there's something wrong with my slide, but I will just go ahead then.
01:21
Okay. On this quote, I would like to start my talk. Basically, if you could see the picture used, you would see that mentorship is basically all about helping someone else to get up there. In the context of open source projects, it's about helping people to be able to understand an OIS project,
01:42
and how to participate, communicate, contribute to the advancement of the project. So the role of mentorship in open source projects cut across different areas. For instance, mentorship can serve as a form of training.
02:01
It can serve as a form of motivation for an individual. It could serve as a form of way of advising people on how to come into a particular community, or how to contribute. Mentorship can also be from success stories, that people reduce that as a means to join a particular community.
02:22
And mentorship could serve as a direction for an individual as well. And it could also help also in achieving an individual's goal, or the organizational goals. Organizational goals in this context is the community goal, the OIS project goals. I'm going to be basing this talk on two mentorship programs.
02:44
And that's the LTT program and the GSOC. So these are common OIS mentorship programs that several OIS projects, federal, GNOME, participate in. And it's a mentors-driven program, which is, over time, has a lot of success stories.
03:06
So LTT, for instance, is an internship for supporting diversity in tech. And Google Summer of Code is also a program focused on bringing more developers into open-source software development.
03:21
There are a couple of success stories that have been harvested from these programs. And these are a few of them, right? Looking at the story, for instance, of Derek, who basically was a GSOC student, and now serving as a technical lead and trainer for the African Recopedia development project.
03:46
He started as an intern, and of course he was mentored as well. The same goes for the other two, including Esther. So we cannot over-emphasize the success stories that have come out of these projects and the importance and the role that mentorship has to play.
04:05
Why then do I have to talk about this today? I mean, the same as though the programs are going very well. Do we really have issues with mentors? When I started my career years back, I started by lecturing in a technological institution.
04:21
And I was lecturing in the software development department. One thing I noticed when I joined the program was that we had less people recruiting for the program, and that we had less females graduating out of the program. And I realized that there was a gap.
04:41
So what I did was to create mini mentorship programs where I involved other lecturers and helped to mentor students and ask what they were going through and how difficult the program was. As you could imagine at the time in Nigeria, at that time that was about ten years ago, there was not much mentors around when it comes to technology.
05:04
And so we had to create a little community in the institution that helped students thrive. In the space of two semesters, there was a great change as to how many students began to graduate.
05:20
For instance, we had previously had five females registered in each program. That's the maximum we've gotten, and we never get one of them to graduate. But after the mentorship program, we started having females graduating, above five being recruited, and the numbers were the same at the point of graduation.
05:41
That's the impact mentorship has to play. That's why I am passionate about talking about how mentorship is very important in open source projects and how it could help in sustaining open source projects. So ongoing challenges for identifying mentors in OS projects. There have been several studies that talked about the challenges that mentors are going through at the moment.
06:04
I'm going to be basing this on the recent research that was done by Apogee Software Foundation in 2021, where they had a survey carried out. And out of this survey, 175 people responded to this survey. There is a little bit of typo there.
06:22
And in this survey, the findings say that 175 people were participating as a mentor in the Apogee Software Foundation. And they said that they are able to only participate once a month to mentor newcomers coming into the project.
06:42
Some of them said that why they are able to participate basically is because they were partly paid, so they had the job and they couldn't do that on the site. As you could imagine, open source project is basically based on volunteering in a way. And others complained about experience. The knowledge is limited. It is not evenly shared across different people in the project.
07:07
There was also language barriers and social interaction as well. And others talked about demographics. Interviewing some of these mentors, two challenges came up.
07:22
The first was that the challenge difficulty in identifying appropriate tasks for newcomers. And that means that the tasks that newcomers have to go through is not properly spelt out, or is not simple and clear enough for the mentors to understand to even mentor a new person in the community.
07:44
And the others said that the mentor has to figure out how to get their mentees the information they need. So this is based on documentation. They are not properly spelt out for mentors. When mentors don't understand this, they don't know how to get involved. So we have an issue with having mentors participate in any program at all in open source.
08:07
So there are different strategies that are ongoing at the moment that have been followed to recruit mentors. And this is just a few of different projects. So utilizing social media as a platform to call out for mentors.
08:23
Utilizing social media as a platform to connect to different mentors. And as you can see, the federal projects, the Glennon projects, and the Wikimedia Tech projects. All of these and every other projects are beginning to look into social media as a means to get mentors, to recruit mentors into their projects.
08:46
All the strategies for recruiting mentors for open source sustainability are based on what is going on in different projects at the moment that has been tested and tried. And I talked to put them together. There are more to this and I'll be happy to hear all the suggestions as well.
09:06
So one is to make processes and documentation clear. I said in my previous slide how it is important that mentors need to understand the processes required to become a mentor and what they need to know to tell the new community.
09:25
This can help a great deal in recruiting more newcomers into an open source project and helping the project longevity. And also have a communication channel for mentors. Communication channel at this point is basically depending on the mailing list or Slack or any
09:45
communication channel discourse that your project is utilizing, there should be a dedicated channel for mentors. This dedicated channel can help to have new people come into the channel to either volunteer to mentor or understand what it takes to mentor.
10:01
This communication should not just be on the mentors channel. It should be spread across the introduction channel in each of the communities. The third part is mentor stipends. Mentor stipends is an ongoing discussion since I've been discussing recently about open source sustainability.
10:27
And I've come to find that there's so much conversations around mentor stipends. So what this means is that mentors should be given a level of stipends to be motivated. This is more like a conversation now. Open source is viewed on volunteerism. Why should mentors be given stipends?
10:48
So demographics are different. I'm from Africa. And basically, when you're having to recruit mentors, one of the things you want to look at is motivation.
11:01
So there are different ways people can be motivated in different demographics. And stipends is one way that I found that would be helpful in motivating and bringing in more mentors in open source projects. And lastly is gender balance. The path for gender balance is a problem that I mentioned in the last research that was done by the Apogee Foundation,
11:32
where they had more male people responding to the survey that was sent out. They had about 97.6 males responding to the survey.
11:46
This is to tell us that there are still fewer women in open source projects. So ensuring that you call for more females in open source projects to mentor other females, see that if possible, to create a balance in it, to bridge this gap that we're currently having in the open source project.
12:13
I'm going to end my talk today, which is actually on a quote by Jim Norman, which was formerly a military personnel in the US decades back.
12:26
So his actual quote is, mentoring is an indispensable requirement for an artist's quote, not only as cues and experience yet, but as value in the essential re-examination of one's own work and techniques. And this is my version of the quote. Mentoring is a necessary requirement for the sustainability of open source projects,
12:50
not only as cues and experience shared, but a person is transformed, resulting in long-term gains for all stakeholders. When I was trying to put out this version of my quote together, I just had to summarize everything I want to talk about today.
13:07
The gains that we have in promoting mentorship via different strategies that I've mentioned and the ones I'm here to learn about, it doesn't just cut across the individual alone. I mean, yes, the individual gain.
13:21
But the individual puts it back. It's more like a refueling into the open source project. And this is able to breed in more talents, diverse style talents, and also, you know, create a space where new people can come into the community. Open source projects is built on volunteerism.
13:42
But the space at which themes are going at the moment in open source, there's a need to diversify in our thoughts. There's a need to diversify in what we have been used to from years back. So begin to look at themes, especially now that open source is beginning to thrive in other parts of the world, Asia and Africa.
14:01
What works in this environment and how can we get these people into open source projects? I look forward to answering some of your questions. Thank you very much.