We have a backlog of reserved tickets for newcomer sprints, but if those aren’t picked up during a sprint, we should clear them.
Are there events beyond Djangonaut Space and Django on the Med in the next two months? If you know someone who is running a Django sprint event focused on new contributors, please tag them here.
If you are one of these people and would benefit from reserved tickets, please say so.
@pauloxnet and @carltongibson do you expect to have many newcomers at Django on the Med where this list may be helpful?
Following @sarahboyce’s comment on the ticket about the Easy Pickings flag being a “destination” after “unreserving” a ticket for a sprint, I’d love some brainstorming on maybe merging the concepts.
The “Easy Pickings” experience hasn’t been great. Very little counts as an easy picking; truly easy issues get claimed immediately; they aren’t important enough to prioritize for review; they float out to sea.
I’ve been using “Django Sprints” as more like “Mentorship Pickings” or “Human Pickings”. Or even, “Inappropriate for seasoned contributors, but important enough to prioritize for this feature release, please help”. This is larger than just “beginners”. Especially in areas like the ORM, we need more than “good first issues”, we need “good tenth issues”. If we let a loop where the human role is very attenuated claim such a ticket, we advance the future maintainability of Django not at all.
If it’s “Human Pickings”, of course the human may be using AI assistance, but I have at least some guarantee that the role of the human in the loop is pulling some weight, because they’ve transported themselves to an in-person/virtual sprint/event/discord/whathaveyou.
Should announcing your intentions in some sort of in-person/virtual sprint/event/discord/whathaveyou be the only way to begin contributing? No. Should we encourage it and reserve some tickets for it? Yes!
tl;dr – maybe we replace “Easy Pickings” checkbox with “Mentorship Opportunity” checkbox and use the Owner Field to record the specific opportunity imagined.
I don’t think this addresses the underlying problem of, at some point these reserved tickets should be opened up for others to take on.
I don’t think we necessarily need to change the fields on the tickets. Using owner=Django Sprints is sufficient to cover the mentorship opportunity flow you’re describing. It’s the human execution of the process that we’re lacking, not tooling.
Well, I thought it would be clearer when to clear the assignee, if the assignee is “Djangonaut Space Session 7” or “DjangoCon US 2026” rather than “Django Sprints”, which is nebulous, no?
Ah, I think you’re missing a bit of context that I’m trying to solve for. We recently had a PyLadies Zurich sprint event, an event in Korea and the DjangoCon US sprints all within 2 weeks of each other. All of which were using the Django Sprints pool (I think).
Gotcha, that helps. I think the Korea event reserved to their own pool, but not every event will want to do that, I get it.
It doesn’t feel like it to me, because we’re proposing clearing all these owners pretty soon. I don’t mind leaving it these tickets assigned to Mentorship Opportunity for a year or forever.
Sorry, I’ve hijacked your thread long enough – you just wanted to know about any upcoming events. I can raise it some other time 
In my mind, we can always fine more mentorship opportunity / sprintable tickets. Things become stale and people are identifying lower hanging fruit each week. I don’t want to see the framework wait to implement only because we want to use it for a new contributor. At some point we should implement the thing.
Maybe a complete purge is too far in that direction. Especially if someone wants to host a last minute event. I’d like to try aging these out faster than the 6mo vulture period.