Jesse Noller

*wipes the dust off the blog*

*cough* Now that PyCon 2011 is slightly behind us/me — I’ve man­aged to eke out time to draft and pro­pose some­thing that’s been gnaw­ing at me for some time — propos­ing a Python-Core men­tor­ship pro­gram. You can see the python-dev thread here, but I have also reposted the email below. I’m inter­ested in thoughts/feelings/feedback about the idea.

Hello every­one:

I wanted to take a moment to out­line another idea which came out of PyCon 2011 this year from numer­ous sources — a Python Core Men­tor­ship Pro­gram pred­i­cated on the idea that Python-Core, and Python as a whole would be served by fur­ther low­er­ing the bar­rier to entry of con­tri­bu­tion, and to pro­vide a pro­gram to con­nect new pro­gram­mers, stu­dents, women, and oth­ers to expe­ri­enced Python-Core devel­op­ers (Mentors).

Brett’s revamp of the Dev guide was part one of “secret plan to get more peo­ple involved in python-core” — this is another part, but I’m not sure of the num­ber­ing scheme.

The mis­sion of the Python Core Men­tor Pro­gram is to pro­vide an open and wel­com­ing place to con­nect stu­dents, pro­gram­mers — and any­one inter­ested in con­tribut­ing to the Python-Core devel­op­ment. This project is based on the idea that the best way to wel­come new peo­ple into any project is a venue which con­nects them to men­tors who can assist in guid­ing them through the con­tri­bu­tion process, includ­ing dis­cus­sions on lists such as python-dev, and python-ideas, the bug tracker, mer­cu­r­ial, code reviews, etc.

Addi­tion­ally, men­tors will assist in some­thing incred­i­bly crit­i­cal to main­tain con­trib­u­tor inter­est: get­ting patches through the process and actu­ally *com­mit­ted*. We all know — not every­one who is men­tor will have all the answers, so men­tors also act as con­duits to oth­ers who will have the answer.

The project itself will (hope­fully) be low in time-spent, and largely self-managing. We will start sim­ple with a mail­ing list (core-mentorship at python.org) where men­tors, and those who wish to be men­tored or ask ques­tions may do so. This mail­ing list will have a code of con­duct which will help pre­vent flame wars, or other coun­ter­pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sions — a code of con­duct also makes it clear to men­tors what they’re agree­ing to when they decide to participate.

The new list will also have a closed, members-only archive. After con­sult­ing with other core devel­op­ers, we believe it’s eas­ier to ask ques­tions when you don’t have to worry about Google pick­ing up your words from a pub­lic archive. We want to make this list a resource for peo­ple to be able to get started, ask “silly” ques­tions, and so on — our goal is to turn any­one who wishes to be into an active, sus­tain­able com­mit­ter to Python.

Men­tors will be asked to answer ques­tions — but also assist peo­ple in need of help with dis­cus­sions on the mail­ing lists and bug tracker (con­ver­sa­tions on which could have become con­tentious or stress­ful) and gen­er­ally to be advo­cates for the peo­ple being men­tored. For exam­ple — if a per­son sub­mits a patch to the tracker, the men­tor list may help them through ini­tial code reviews, or dis­cus­sions with other core devel­op­ers. The job is to act as an expe­ri­enced proxy for them.

The first step to this project is to ask for vol­un­teer men­tors — peo­ple who are will­ing to help answer ques­tions on the list, and gen­er­ally guide peo­ple as needed being as friendly and cour­te­ous and wel­com­ing as possible.

If you are inter­ested in being a men­tor — or have feed­back about this plan in gen­eral, please feel free to reach out to me (jnoller at gmail.com) directly. My goal, once this is setup, is to have the project largely self-managing, with the PSF help­ing to mar­ket it to the com­mu­nity as a whole.

Jesse

Update: We’ve launched, and we’re doing well — check out this post right here for more infor­ma­tion and the code of conduct.