Open Source Summit North America 2023

Undergraduate students want mentors; they also want innovative projects to work on that enhance their technical skill set. Open source projects are a great source of mentors for these students and provide a unique opportunity to gain practical, hands-on experience. If properly matched with competent mentors, these students seed academic contributor communities and feed into the talent pipeline for other open source ecosystems. Starting as a mentor organization with the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2018, UCSC's Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) saw just how powerful effective matchmaking could be – both for students and for the mentors working with them. In order to increase the impact on academic open source projects, CROSS (and later the UCSC OSPO) expanded its work through the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) bringing in more sponsors interested in supporting academic OS projects. This presentation looks at what the OSRE team has learned from hands-on mentoring efforts and provides practical ways others can play the matchmaker. During this session the speaker will also discuss how these programs, both academic and non-academic based, can benefit mentors and students, increase community diversity, and improve project impact and sustainability.