Thank you immensely for your unwavering support. Unfortunately, we must extend our sincere apologies as the UX research for this project has encountered unforeseen challenges, leading to several delays in our progress timeline. Despite these obstacles, we remain dedicated to overcoming them and greatly appreciate your continued patience and understanding.
Our initial phase of UX research draws inspiration from a critical finding from the Linux Foundation Research study titled ‘Mentorship in Open Source.’ The study highlights a common issue in mentorship programs: ‘Many mentorship programs are informal, with mentors and mentees often left to figure out how to work together best. This can make it difficult for mentees to get the support and guidance they need, leading to frustration and disengagement.’ In our preliminary solution, an S-Team for open source mentorship will consist of 1 maintainer as the lead mentor (serving as the product owner of the team and a long-term role model for new reviewers and students), 1 professional project manager as the mentor scrum master (Scrum for the ‘education’ part), 2-3 new reviewers as mentor developers, and 4-6 student as mentee developers. The primary responsibility of the lead mentor (maintainer) is to train the new reviewers to become good/great mentors in more effective and engaged way. Meanwhile, these new reviewers will mentor the students, aiding their emergence as new contributors through code reviews and other forms of personalized guidance. In our present design, Scrum is primarily applied to the ‘education’, informal learning and non-code contributions aspects of open-source mentorship, such as students reflecting on code reviews and the lessons learned. We hope that Scrum can help minimize the time input required from maintainers and reviewers in administrative tasks.
The next phase plans to introduce a pilot open-source mentorship program named ‘OpenDxD Summer of Collaborative Learning’. This program sets itself apart from the Google Summer of Code by emphasizing Cross-Functional Team Mentoring, Collaborative Learning, and the synergy between Designers and Developers. Experienced designers/developers and university students will collaborate in agile teams, designing and developing free landing page templates under the MIT license for open-source projects. Moreover, we are keen to leverage the power of open-source mentorship to tackle more complex UX design challenges in the future, such as creating user-friendly GUIs/dashboards for Kubernetes. However, as we prepare for the next phase, we face several challenges:
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Ideally, we hope to establish partnerships with exceptional open-source communities such as OSD, Kaleidos, and MUI to collectively enhance the experiment design of pilot mentorship programs. However, our inexperience in drafting effective cold emails for potential partnerships presents a notable challenge.
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We aim to creatively use exceptional open-source tools such as Taiga and Penpot to better recognize design contributions, similarly to how GitHub acknowledges code contributions. We also plan to develop an AI Mentor to address developers’ UX/UI design questions, enhancing communication and collaboration between designers and developers. We are seeking experienced UX researchers ready to join us as volunteer advisors.
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Following guidance from a leading expert in open source sustainability research, we are exploring the development of a new incentive model, distinct from Google Summer of Code. In this model, mentees are not individually financially compensated, but mentors may receive sponsorships from companies. Additionally, outstanding teams could be awarded attractive prizes similar to those offered at well-known hackathons. We are seeking experienced UX researchers ready to join us as volunteer advisors.
We welcome any contributions towards addressing those challenges and improving the cross-functional team mentoring experience in open-source projects.