Hi everyone, It's been great to read some good insights on this discussion.
How to attract new contributors from a different demographic (geographic area and age)? Good question. I wanted to share with you my experience as (second year) organization administrator and mentor for OpenWISP <http://openwisp.org/> (an open source network management system built on top of Django) in the Google Code-In program <https://codein.withgoogle.com/>, which I think can really help in attracting new contributors from a different demographic group, which is really great for a project, because brings in a more diverse perspective and fresh lymph and enthusiasm. *Google Code-In* is the sibling of the *Google Summer of Code* (in which django participated several times), and it is a global contest in which pre-university students in the range of 13-17 learn how to contribute to open source. It works as follows: - some open source organizations are selected each year, the list of 2018 participating orgs <https://codein.withgoogle.com/organizations/> counts some notable participants as Postgres, Drupal, Wikimedia, KDE, OSGeo, Fedora - these organizations publish a series of tasks with the aim of helping students familiarize with their codebase and practices in order to start contributing - each tasks contains information, tags and list available mentors for that tasks - students can see the list of tasks in a dashboard, it is publicly available so you can also see it: https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/ - students choose the tasks they want to work on and they "claim" it, they then use the organization's support channels (eg: IRC) to interact with mentors and other fellows to look for help - at the end of the contest, each organization chooses 2 winners and 4 finalists who receive prizes, the 2 winners win a trip to Google's HQ in California Tasks can be about coding, QA/testing, design, outreach/research, documentation/training. This program brings some challenges and needs a lot of patience, but has been great for the OpenWISP community for the following reasons: - we've been lucky to get some really great students, their skills for their age is just incredible (teenage prodigies really) - they learn really fast, so total beginners become productive in 2 months while more skilled students become great contributors in no time - the big influx of beginners who seem to all stumble on the same issues really helped us to understand which roadblocks had to be removed in order to improve our documentation and make it easier for them to onboard - the demographic is really diverse, many students are from Asia but we got some great students from Poland, Russia and the Americas - the contest runs online, worldwide and remotely, no physical presence is needed - we've been able to close a lot of the easier issues and some very useful higher impact (non-trivial) issues - just OpenWISP trained over 950 students in 2018 <https://twitter.com/openWISP/status/1073267406779400193>, some of these students will become mentors next year, allowing us to train even more - some of these students stick around and keep contributing also when the program ends - they bring in a fresh perspective, helping us to keep the project modern and ensure generational handover (which I think it's an overlooked problem in today's open source community) *One important note*: many of the good students of OpenWISP choose us because our system is built in Python and Django and they either already know and like this stack or want to learn to use it. So I think having some Django mentors to participate in this program, either with a dedicated organization or under an umbrella organization, could be beneficial for Django and Open Source in general. It's not a silver bullet, it's not a panacea, but it can help. PS: in one of our training tasks we have our students do the DjangoGirls tutorial <https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/4693883482013696/>, they really love this task :-) Federico -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/e4b230d9-7b09-4a99-9268-43dc4b07a810%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
