Problem: It takes a long time to build a community

[weex]

If there is a proven recipe for success, it is not easy to discover and/or doesn't have cultural support.

[mariha]

This post gives an interesting and convincing to me recipe: https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/how-i-recruit-and-mentor-contributors-and-how-you-should-too/965

I used to onboard devs to my team (at Sabre, it was a big product team divided into a few sub-teams, organized somehow similar to a tribe in Spotify model) and I did a similar thing, on a smaller scale, 1 max 2 people at a time. I think it worked pretty well.

First I was scheduling them a few meetings with a BA or someone from product team to give them an overview of the domain.

Then, after setting up the env (what was described in a guide and they did by themselves) I picked 3-5 easy but diverse defects from our backlog for them to choose one of them to work on, and guided them through our dev process while solving the issue together.

Then usually they did one more easy defect by themselves, asking me for help whenever they didn't know something / I was checking with them if they need any help if they didn't ask me about anything for a few days.

After that they were quite ready to work in their sub-team on whatever features they were currently working on.

[weex]

This post gives an interesting and convincing to me recipe: https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/how-i-recruit-and-mentor-contributors-and-how-you-should-too/965

Great share! Actively offering to mentor people seems so simple and gets right to the point of what many of us probably dance around in the name of scalability. In a business, it seems obvious as part of onboarding to help people get comfortable but the stakes are higher which helps overcome any social friction. I'm sure I'll have more to add once I watch the presentation in there.