Mentors are contributors who assist, inspire, enable, and encourage new or aspiring contributors. Some mentors do so regularly; some do it at a dedicated contribution event; others do it informally by answering questions from contributors in text chat channels.

Mentors find a new rewarding interaction with the issue queue, and learn new skills along with new contributors. Mentoring gives contributors the opportunity to both scale their contributions manyfold.

Impact: 

Without able, inspired volunteers, the Drupal core will wither and die. Mentors are key to success of the maintenance of Drupal core. Mentoring is part of the Drupal community's Principle 3: Foster a learning environment.

Mentoring addresses two complementary issues:

  1. The Drupal issue queues contain a large number of unresolved issues, and we need the help of more volunteers to address these issues efficiently. While all Drupal users rely on Drupal core, documentation, translations, and other aspects of the project, only a fraction participate in resolving issues and making other improvements. New contributors bring fresh energy and a diversity of perspectives, and can both reduce the burden on longtime contributors and improve the experience of all community members.
  2. Contributing can seem unapproachable, both because there are so many issues and for Drupal core in particular, because the process for resolving core issues is more rigorous and involved than it is for contributed modules or smaller open source projects. It can be difficult to know where and how to start contributing, or what it will take to get a specific issue fixed.
Accountable for: 
  • Promoting/encouraging contributions to the Drupal project and community
  • Giving feedback to novice contributors
  • Giving feedback to mentoring leads and coordinators
  • Triaging issues: understanding status, priority of issues, closing duplicates etc.
  • Triaging novice issues
  • Co-writing issue summaries
  • Co-writing change notifications for needs work issues tagged with "Needs change notification"
  • Writing tests for bug reports that don't have them
  • Swapping patch reviews
  • Mentoring before and during events
How to get started: 

An experienced contributor can volunteer to mentor contributors at the next DrupalCon, at a DrupalCamp that has a mentored contribution component, or at a Global Contribution Day. See the Finding an event page for more information about these types of events, and the Contribute by Mentoring page to find out how to connect with other mentors. See the Mentoring suggestions page to learn how to become a great mentor.

Skills required: 
Mentoring
Tasks this role performs: 
Triage Novice issues and tasks