Hi folks, I wrote up a post with my thoughts on how small groups can help create better mentorship within the Django community. If folks have thoughts or questions, I’d love to hear them!
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Good points. I think for a wider audience recorded tutorials/sessions might be helpful, even more efficient. I wasn’t accepted to Djangonaut Space as a mentee but later stumbled upon their streams on youtube. Watching code reviews was still helpful. Would love to see other projects do the same.
Ideally, we’d want mentors’ time being used efficiently without leaving potential new contributors behind…
I don’t disagree that those are helpful. Creating content to help others is always beneficial and appreciated. That said, I believe the direct mentorship in small groups is going to help the community more than having people consume content on their own.
We seem to be blocked in a number of areas by the lack of hands to do things. There are existing resources out there to help people learn how to do all these things. They’ve been there for a while. And yet, we have had this need for more hands to do things for years. That implies that passive approaches to growing our contributor base have limits.
I think the narrow focus and hands on approach of direct mentorship is likely to generate regular contributors to the community. If we do this and do it well, then theoretically, over time there will be more opportunities for mentorship because we will have more experienced people and we will have adopted a culture of mentorship.