Provide some "Getting Started" advice and support for students
This could be part of a larger effort to provide getting started information for the whole community.
Throughout the year we get requests from students who want to know how to engage with us. I assume that -- at least in many cases -- they're sending the same or similar requests to other organisations in hopes of getting some response, but are engaging in good faith.
In response to a recent request for information on how to contribute to the Eclipse Chemclipse project sent to the EMO inbox, we gave this response (along with appropriate links):
Eclipse Chemclipse is an open source project that operates entirely in the open. You should connect directly with the project team using their public communication channels. You can contact them either through their mailing list, by commenting directly on issues, or by contributing pull requests. You really don't need to announce yourself or ask permission, if you want to participate and contribute, then participate and contribute.
There's more information about participation with the project on their page.
In response to a far more generic request on our soc-dev mailing list, @tobradovic gave this excellent response:
Considering your interest in Java: Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate... I would like to invite you to look into Jakarta EE website and review the following pages to start with Get Involved and Stay Connected.
Please look into feel free to browse any projects / repositories under EE4J or Jakarta EE, but focusing on project that has issues categorized as with labels "Good first issue" and "Help wanted" would be my recommendation.
Here is an example of such a project and and repository link.
https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/cargotracker/issues
Please join the Slack Workspace (link is at Stay Connected page) for the easier and instant communication with the community.
The soc-dev mailing list is the one that we use for mentor/student communication during, for example, Google Summer of Code. A Getting Started page for students should, I believe, reference our work with that and other programmes as well.
As part of this, we should consider how we help project teams help themselves. Tanja followed up her response to the student with another (excellent) email to the project leads.
please note that we do have interest from the young individuals to take part in our open source projects. In order to help them out, can you please use "Good first issue" and "Help wanted" labels?
Perhaps having a list of projects that provide good support for newcomers (by using labels as Tanja suggests) would be a helpful addition.
The number of students who actually engage us is not a huge number (I can try to get some actual numbers if we believe that would be valuable), but this is a demographic that represents an investment in the future and providing at least a small amount of help feels like something that can pay dividends later.
Generalising this to target the broader community beyond students may give us more bang for our buck.
IMHO we should avoid getting too deep into trying to teach how open source works. There's other resources for that (e.g, the Apereo Foundation) that we should leverage/support.