Building mentoring into an open source community that welcomes and values new contributors

Using the Drupal community as an example, we will look at the many ways mentoring fits into all the experience layers of an open source project.

Mentoring can take on many aspects: helping new contributors make their first contribution to an open source project, helping contributors make contributions in areas new to them, helping people move from contributing to mentoring others, and helping people move to managing initiatives.

We will look at removing barriers to contribution, contribution tools, contribution documentation, structured office hours, in person events, and using the issue queue. We will look at how mentoring can change from something structured to something that happens as a matter of habit for lots of people, valuing new contributors within the whole project.