Mentoring Maintainers

I’m going to try something new. For this upcoming quarter, so until the end of the year, I’m going to put aside Thursday afternoons (Europe) to be online, doing my maintenance, a kind of office hour, offering a support group to existing maintainers, and offering mentoring to new or prospective maintainers in the Django ecosystem. (More details to follow as I come up with them.)

If it goes well, we can carry on beyond the new year.

I feel like I’ve been banging this drum for a long time but, there’s a gap between making your first open source contributions, and then going on to pick up the role of a package maintainer. Part of this is economic: unpaid labour being what it is, the prevalence of white men as open source maintainers is simply a reflection of privilege.

Part though is that we don’t have the right support structures. I’m not sure that I know what they are, but I’d like to see if being available to give advice and mentoring can help that at all. So, if you’re a PyLady or a Django Girl (or a member of any other underrepresented group) in the Django community, and making that step to maintenance is something that you’ve considered, do reach out.