Daniel James posted on the Make Community blog about a proposal for onboarding new contributors, including a mentorship program.
Now, whilst the community team does a great job at the community side of things such as WordCamps and meetup events to name a couple of things and getting people involved – this new team would reach beyond what the community team does and also cover every other team in WordPress as well. I’ve heard first hand from others (myself being one!) that getting involved with WordPress is incredibly difficult. There’s so many moving parts and all kinds of things happening that it’s very hard to make that first contribution. Even so, once you’ve made the first contribution, it’s hard to find out where to go next.
The team would help steer new contributors to good first bugs to work on, get familiar with contributing processes, and more.
There are some existing things to help with this (like specific Trac labels for new contributors) but I love the idea of a more formal approach. If this is something you or your company could contribute to, I’m sure they’d love your feedback.
The Support Team has been working on a regular (every couple of months) “new Support Volunteer Orientation” in the #forums Slack channel. We have done it twice now, with some good feedback. More recently, some of the international forums moderators have reached out for the outline to be able to offer the orientation in their own languages.