By Akashdeep Dhar in FOSDEM 2024 — Nov 2, 2023

Mentorship Within Communities And Beyond - A FOSDEM 24 Submission

This is a talk proposal for the FOSDEM 2024 edition of Community Devroom titled "Mentorship Within Communities And Beyond - Projection Experiments With Case Studies" submitted by Akashdeep Dhar, targeting project leaders, contributing members, community managers, contributing members and students.

PROPOSAL

Title

Mentorship Within Communities And Beyond

Subtitle

Projection Experiments With Case Studies

Content

The importance of mentorship is unparalleled in communities looking for onboarding and retaining contributors to work towards achieving a mission. Multiple free and open-source software communities participate in benefactor programmes like Google Summer Of Code, Outreachy and Major League Hacking to be able to introduce new contributors. While starting off can be easy, the notion "If you build it, they will come" rarely meets its meaning with various problems like culture differences, expectation mismatches and compatibility issues that can make their way through a mentorship endeavour.

In this discussion, we wish to present the possible challenges one can face during mentorship in free and open-source software communities and how to build strategies to overcome them. Our projection experiment aims to demonstrate how one can get started with making the correct conversations across various curated scenarios that may take place in free and open-source software communities. These can be helpful examples to follow for both mentors, who have been contributing for a long time for a long time and mentees, who are just getting started with participating in a project.

Who is the target audience?

Project leaders looking for methods to onboard and retain contributors effectively in a community
Professionals venturing to share their knowledge and experience with other junior contributors
Community managers attempting to learn the best practices for incentivizing positive community health
Budding contributors striving to participate in a community to make meaningful contributions
Existing members seeking to expand connections to other subprojects and subteams within their community
Students trying to put their learnings into utility while contributing to FOSS communities

How does the target audience benefit?

Project leaders would be understanding the effective methods to onboard and retain contributors
Professionals would be recognizing how they can share their learnings for professional growth
Community managers would be appreciating the best practices of incentivizing positive community health
Budding contributors would be finding multiple methods to meaningfully participate in communities
Existing members would be learning to step up their contributions by participating in other parts
Students would be comprehending ways to learn new things and make friends while contributing

Speakers

Akashdeep Dhar

Attachments

UNAVAILABLE

CONVERSATIONS

SCHEDULE