Re: KDE Needs You – Help Us Improve Mentorship!

[Johnny Jazeix]

Hi,

thank you all for those who answered the surveys. I did a summary of
the answers for those interested:

# Contributors survey:

The survey was answered by 13 people, 9 on GSoC, 7 on SoK (3 did
both). Most of the answers from this year participants.
There is a real good feedback from participants: 10 considered the
program excellent, 2 good, 1 neutral and all of them recommend to
participate to a mentorship program.

The main motivations to participate are:
* Personal development: learn development / gain experience on real projects.
* Personal gain: Money / Travel.
* Community driven: Help KDE/opensource/give back to FOSS /
Cool-welcoming community.

On positive feedback: KDE is an excellent community to start on Open
Source, with kind and welcoming community. Experienced and supportive
mentors are really appreciated. Working on real-life and interesting
projects is a great motivation and provides a sense of accomplishment.
Being rewarded (goodies for SoK, money for GSoC) is a good bonus. It
helps a lot to grow as a developer by learning and helps on the career
as some companies start to look at OSS contributions.

What could be improved is the communication: not easy sometimes to
find the correct channel or mailing list to subscribe. Not enough
frequent discussions seem to make it difficult for some contributors
to ask when they are blocked and some expected more recognition after
the end of the program (possibility to be hired by KDE?). Some regret
the lack of opportunities to connect with other participants. To help
the immersion in KDE, more documentation would also be welcome:
examples of previous proposals, videos/better documentation to help
setting up the dev environment. A clear list of first tasks/beginner
tasks would also help. Other small point: C++ language may not be the
favorite choice for students nowadays.
Finally, if we except the current GSoC/SoK contributors that replied,
3 contributors do not contribute anymore to any OSS project (no time,
unable to compile software) and the other 2 contribute to either KDE
or other softwares.

# Mentors survey:
The survey was answered by 10 people, 9 on GSoC, 6 on SoK (5 did
both). Most mentors do multiple years (only 2 new mentors in 2023 and
no new mentors the last 2 years) and in 2021, 5 stopped mentoring. 2
mentors participated as mentee before.
The feedback is more neutral than mentees: 1 considered the program
excellent, 4 good, 3 neutral, 2 bad but most still recommend to
participate to a mentorship program as a mentor as it is still a good
experience to have and allow to share your knowledge to others.

The main motivations to participate are:
* Personal development: learn mentoring, help growing contributors,
improve our softwares.
* Community driven: money for KDE, pushing KDE goals, bring new contributors.

For the feedback, the most important one is the lack of communication.
Whether it is with the mentees (due to lack of experience) or other
mentors/community, there is something missing. Having more
communication from admins to help finding the docs, more communication
between mentors (same project or not) to share the experiences is
important. And communication with the mentees are keys to a good
experience. Having more active admins would help keeping a
contributing dynamics. Mentors have a full job besides mentoring and
with timezone differences, it may be difficult to provide the good
level of support on time. Mentoring requires time, patience and
stamina. The quality of the selected mentee is really impacting the
experience. Finding a good one, genuinly interested by the project and
not money/résumé provides a really good experience and help retaining
them. However, if their motivation is more scholar or do not manage to
tell when they face issues, provide low quality code or are not
motivated, this will be a bad experience. A lot of effort will be
done, often for nothing more than if the work was done directly by the
mentor. And wasted if the contributor leaves as soon as the program
finishes. Seeing your mentee staying in the community, even on other
projects is rewarding.
Ideally, we should not even select proposals where people don’t seem
interested by the project. However it’s difficult to know this only
with the proposal (especially since the rise of LLM). In case we still
select this kind of profile, knowing when to stop the project before
putting too much energy is important (in all cases, it will leave a
bad taste in the mouth).
On how to keep mentees involved after the programs, multiple ideas
were raised: They need to have a genuine motivation to stay active on
the project once they start they corporate journey (find a good
balance with enough OSS to keep the motivation). Either reward them by
crediting them or providing budget for them to participate to
events/conferences. Or on their side, if they use the software on
their personal life, it is a good motivation to continue contributing.
Being part of the core team of the software is important (voice being
heard, and not being only listening to others) but not enough. Finding
the right tasks to work on (not too easy because boring, not too
difficult as frustrating if they can’t do it alone) to keep a good
level of involvement, learning and happiness of fixing things.

Once again, thanks to all of the people who filled the surveys, it
provides valuable data.

Cheers,
Johnny, for the KNY team

Le jeu. 19 juin 2025 à 07:53, Johnny Jazeix <jazeix at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Le lun. 9 juin 2025 à 21:22, Johnny Jazeix <jazeix at gmail.com> a écrit :
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > As part of the "KDE Needs You" Goal, we are working to make
> > contributor onboarding easier and more effective. To do that, we need
> > your help. We have created two short surveys, one for current/former
> > mentors and one for current/former mentees, that will help us
> > understand what motivates people to join, what keeps them engaged and
> > why some decide to drop out or not come back. Your insights will guide
> > how we improve KDE’s mentorship programs for the long run.
> >
> > Survey will remain open until June 24th.
> >
> > Please take a few minutes to share your experience:
> >
> > Mentor survey:
> > https://survey.kde.org/324844
> >
> > Mentee Survey:
> > https://survey.kde.org/728425
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Johnny, for the KNY team
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> kind reminder. For now, we only have a few answers on each survey.
> Thanks to the people who took the time to reply but we don't have yet
> enough data to analyse. Can you please share your thoughts about the
> mentorship programs you took part before June 24th?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Johnny, for the KNY team