New Contributors and Mentorship

One of the ongoing efforts of osmosis is to promote community involvement and mentor prospective developers. Three initial efforts will be:

• issues for straightforward but non-breaking code problems will be opened with a tag for first-time only. These should only be completed by new users who have never contributed a pull request to a project, and will be given extra leeway and assistance to complete, once someone has identified themselves as willing to attempt.

• A curated set of community resources will be created, focusing on providing guidance to get a newer developer up-and-running as painlessly as possible, as well as link to resources to continue to study and improve outside the scope of osmosis projects. This will include resources on git, software engineering best practices, high quality R code examples. The objective is to minimize the amount of time generally 'googling', and instead have enough resources immediately at their fingers to reference and use to start contributing.

• Summer interns and/or graduate students willing to put at least 50% effort to a project will be given additional direct mentorship in the form of more frequent code reviews, project planning and software design, and general troubleshooting.