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Mentorship as a Pathway to Open-Source Project Sustainability

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Mentorship as a Pathway to Open-Source Project Sustainability
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39
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Nowadays, sustainability is often discussed around open-source (OS) projects. Research has shown that OS projects have been sustaining their project over the years through forking, which has continued to serve as an invisible hand of support to several OS projects. Forking has helped OS projects get through extreme events such as commercial acquisitions, lawsuits, and funding. However, the role of mentorship to open-source project sustainability has been downplayed for a while now. Through mentoring, newcomers to OSS projects acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills relevant to a project's life span. According to research, mentoring newcomers can help recruit and retain skilled and outstanding contributors to open-source projects. But then, how do we identify prospective mentors in an Open-source project? How do we understand mentors' challenges? And how do we build strategies to support mentors' work within an OS project? This talk will introduce how OS projects and communities can leverage mentorship to sustain, retain and recruit diverse contributors.