Presented at linux.conf.au 2012 - more details in speaker notes when downloading presentation
Dave Neary of the GNOME community recently penned a post [0] on mentoring programs for FOSS communities, and his findings were a bit disheartening. Of all those mentees taken in under various mentoring programs, from Google Summer of Code to the Great Documentation Project, only about 1 in 4 became regular contributors to their mentor's projects. Based on these figures, it appears that mentoring programs are actually quite a poor return on investment and mentors would be better off simply doing the work themselves.
Right? Well, sort of. Well, no, actually.
In this talk, Leslie Hawthorn argues that FOSS communities approach mentoring in a problematic manner. Our current approach focuses on the problem from the lens of software development, such as scaling our mentoring processes and measuring return on investment. Rather than focusing on these as measures of success, Leslie will discuss alternative ways to conceptualize the mentoring process and explore the broader social and cultural implications of mentoring folks in FOSS. She will also discuss alternative models for mentoring the next generation of contributors, including recommendations for implementing these models in your projects.
[0] - http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/05/31/effective-mentoring-programs/
5. UC Berkeley
• Participant in the
Undergraduate
Research
Apprentice
Program
• My contributions
to the the
corpus of
scholarly work in
Medieval lit = 0
Sather Gate image courtesy of Flickr user livenature
Anne Middleton photo taken from http://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/94
6. The FOSS Mentor’s Lament
• Mentees don’t
become long-term
contributors
• Mentoring programs
don’t scale
• Return on
Investment
considered poor
Watch image courtesy of Flickr User ribbitvoice
7. Dave Neary on
Mentoring Programs
http://bit.ly/MentorROI
• Excellent analysis of
why mentoring ‘fails’
• Poor retention rates
= better to DIY?
• Decrease the time it
takes to vet mentees
No Tourists image courtesy of Flickr User jenniferwoodardmaderazo
8. Retention Rates
• Search Google for
“good conversion
rate”
• 2%, 2.5%,10%,
15%, 18%
• Prequalifying is
best practice with
any recruitment
process
St. Ignutius image courtesy of Flickr User interdev
10. Getting & Retaining
New Contributors
This is a good and noble goal.
I’ve come to the conclusion that
having this as the ultimate goal
completely misses the point.
Holy Grail Ale image courtesy of Flickr User brostad
11. How Newbies Help You
Whether They Stick Around Or Not
They are the people who know
everything you have forgotten.
Suck button image courtesy of Flickr User jessamyn
12. New Perspectives
The opportunity for introspection provided by
newbie feedback is vital to a project’s health.
Ignorance is Strength image courtesy of Flickr User drtiki
14. Arguments for
Contributing to FOSS
• Resume fodder
• Portfolio builder
• Opportunity to gain new
skills
• Get an awesome job
• Get the boss to pay for
you to come to LCA!
Roll of 20 USD bills image courtesy of Flickr User Images_of_Money
15. When We’re Talking ROI
There’s a Total Mismatch
• Desired Mentor ROI • Desired Mentee ROI
• Decrease my bus factor • Learn stuff so I can
• Get work in my project done • Get cool job
faster
• Find fame and glory
• Finally have time to fix that
#$@!@$% bug that’s been in my • Retire at 40 on tropical island
queue for 3 years
20. Promoting Our Values
• Importance of high quality
output
• Pride in one’s craft
• Joys of exploring and
tinkering
• Impact of collaborating
across geographies and
cultures
• Most importantly: freedom
21. Importance of Influence
People may not agree with you and
they may not do the things you’d
like them to do, but the power of
impacting their thought process is
immeasurable.
Influence Ripples image courtesy of Flickr User cambodia4kidsorg
22. FOSS Mentoring is a Lab
Not
a
Business
Mad Scientist image courtesy of Flickr User jarich
27. Legal
• This presentation is licensed CC-BY-3.0:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
• Unless otherwise indicated, all images or
logos are the property of their respective
copyright holders and are considered fair
use or used with permission.
Editor's Notes
Thank yous: organizers, sponsors, audience; Donna, Mary, Jacinta & Deb for reviewing abstract & helping me refine it.\nBefore we get into the meat of this presentation, I’d like to give you a bit of my background and some insights into why I’m giving this particular talk.\n
Just joined a Portland, Oregon based startup - language agnostic PaaS company\nWeek 3, day 3 and given holidays in states it’s more like 2 weeks all told\nNot relevant experience for this talk but they hired me because of ....\n
Home of some of the world’s largest open source projects - shameless plug, osuosl.org/donate\nLinux Foundation, Apache, Drupal (yay Drupal Down Under!!!)\nMentoring is an integral part of the lab’s operations\nStudent “grads” highly sought after - successfully acquired companies, Mozilla, Fortune 100 jobs\n
Managed Google Summer of Code 2006-2010, 18+ yrs\nCreated contest now known as Google Code In in 2007, pre-university 13-18 yrs\nSome of the world’s best known FOSS mentoring programs, get paid to work on FOSS\n\n
Undergraduate Research Apprentice program - extremely prestigious program\nProfessor studying the interplay between 14th century law courts and creators of literary works (specifically secular texts)\nMade a lot of photo copies in the basement of the Boalt Hall Law Library and spent a lot of time with Prof. Middleton learning about the roots of the English legal system\nI am a failed mentee, but we’ll come back to this later\n
25% “conversion rate”\nhuman intensive interactions cannot be automated - we’re used to automating out repetitive tasks\nRTFM is our closest approximation and it doesn’t yield useful results\n\n
Dave’s post talking about his experiences in Summer of Code and those he’s heard of\nPercival Graham on the Great Documentation Project for LilyPond\n25% retention rate for Mr. Graham, attendees at Community Leadership Summit report 1/6 retained from programs like GSOC\n\n\n
25% is actually a great conversion rate if we are talking about a biz perspective (tyvm Jacinta)\nGentoo has gotten that up to 80% with pre-qualifying tasks\nLowering time spent on prequal is a decent enough point\n\n
I take my role as a mentor and role model for the various communities I serve very seriously\nI also don’t scale (but now you know why I talk this fast)\nbalancing personal need with needs of community - be as available as possible - set office hours if you need to\nlimited time resources - quick vetting process needed - set a pre-qualifying task before future follow up\n\n
we’ve turned this into the holy grail of why you’d mentor\nthe point of the holy grail was that it was really, really hard to find\n
Newbies ignorance has immense value - they are your “this sucks” button - credit Josh Gay\nSometimes “this sucks” isn’t useful, but often it is; Document what sucks is a great vetting task\nLet’s get recursive: simply having new people approach the project makes the project better able to have new people approach it\n
the best “new blood” challenges status quo in project’s approach to everything\n
so now that I’ve argued that just getting new people in the door provides ROI\nwe’re looking at this process and analyzing through SW dev lens: ROI, scalability and efficiency\nthis is inherently flawed - let’s consider what that approach does for our mentees\n
You can learn about version control! You can learn how to work in distributed teams! You’ll learn how to program from some of the best people in the industry! You’ll learn all the things you need to know to be hired by top employers! I know all these arguments because I’ve made them. They are also accurate. All of this is essentially an argument that investing your time will lead to a cash payout for you - ROI - and we generally agree that cash is not always great for FOSS. Remember Stormy’s keynote from 2008 - “Would You Do It Again for Free?”\n
When we’re looking only at ROI, that’s not a long-term motivator for anyone on either side to keep on keeping on. Discussions of ROI come from places like balance sheets, where you care about annual revenue at best and quarterly revenue most of the time.\n\n
How many of us got involved due to ROI? - show of hands (betting there will be zero)\nROI has got fsk all to do with what we’re trying to do here\n\n\n
So, let’s be clear. This is conference rule #1. Frankly, it’s life rule #1. And note too - we don’t say “be excellent to each other as long as I get something out of it” or “be excellent to each other as long as it scales” or “be excellent to each other as long as there is sufficient ROI.” Part of being a mentor is simply being excellent to each other. But beyond that ....\n
While this is a quote attributed to Jesus Christ, I’ve always thought it was the essence of the GPL.\nIt is easy for us to forget that we are highly privilegedi people. No matter what our financial circumstances, if we’re working in tech and attending this conference we’re quite intelligent. That in and of itself is a great privilege. The fact that we have those privileges means we ought to use them well.\n\n\n
We are freed by our native intellect. We are freed by our connections to each other that help us get things done, the economic empowerment that working in a well paid field brings us. I’ll argue that it is our responsibility to help others. Period.\n
You can expose someone to these ideas in seconds. I was: learned about FOSS from seeing the GNOME foot when attempting to restart a music player. Took me years to do something about it, but it took 2 minutes for me to be permanently inspired.\n
I use a macbook air, I’m presenting using keynote and I work for a PaaS company.\nI consider myself a free software free culture advocate. I helped edit the FSF’s last call for contributions.\nI believe in the power of these ideas and I advocate for them everywhere. \n
we cannot expect to see immediate quarterly or even annual returns\nit’s research and development and may lead to absolutely no immediate benefit\nyou have no idea what the value of your time will eventually be. you may never know. \nthat doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest your time and energies.\n\n
So, here’s the kicker folks. Because of that internship at Cal, I got a job working as a marketing assistant for a patent attorney who was the VP of Biz Dev at a comms semi start up. Because I worked for him, I started being interested in patent and copyright law. And things like the EFF. And because I knew about those things, I ended up being assigned to recruit for open source based teams at Google. Which led to my job on Google’s Open Source Team.\n
Prof. Middleton is a Guggenheim fellow and UCB is well funded. She certainly had budget to get those photocopies made without having to spend hours talking to me about Piers Plowman and Chaucer.\nI have produced fsk all in the academy. I have contributed nothing to the research area in my academic field.\nBut I am here with all of you today because of what she taught me and the time she spent with me.\nI bet she has no clue what I’m up to, but I really hope she’d be proud of what I’ve accomplished\n