Debian Women Mentoring Program

Welcome to the mentoring program!

This program is a trial, being run as part of the Debian Women Project. We hope it will be a way to help us achieve our goal of getting more women involved in Debian. If the program is successful, we hope to be able to expand its scope beyond that of the Debian Women project.

What do we mean by "mentoring"?

Mentors involved in the program are people who have experience in some Debian-related skills, and who would like to help other people improve their skills in those areas. We expect that mentoring will be mainly conducted in 1:1 relationships which might include a fairly broad set of activities, such as the following:

  • the mentor giving the mentee technical assistance to achieve a planned task that contributes to Debian
  • the mentor helping the mentee interact within the Debian project in ways that are consistent with achieving the planned tasks
  • the mentor providing help to the mentee in finding documentation that is relevant to the planned tasks
  • the mentor introducing the mentee to aspects of the Debian community and culture, especially those which relate to the planned task
It is important to understand that mentors are not intended to do the actual work involved in solving the problem that the mentee is working on. That would defy the point of the program, which is to have the mentees learn new skills and increase their interaction with and contributions to Debian. It should also be noted that a mentor will not necessarily be able (or willing) to sponsor a mentee's package, even if the mentor is a Debian Developer and the agreed project involves packaging.

How the program works

Potential mentors can email Helen, and will be listed, with their areas of interest, on this webpage. We are deeply appreciative of the people who are willing to volunteer their time to help others in this way, and we hope you will find it interesting and rewarding.

Potential mentees can email Helen to be matched with a potential mentor. Please explain in your email the kinds of activities you are interested in being involved in, and the kind of help you are looking for. We will do our best to match you up with a mentor who is interested in helping out with those things.

Once a mentor and mentee have been paired up, it is essentially up to you to decide together what you will do. Please note that we expect both mentor and mentee to be able to devote at least the amount of time required to get into contact and discuss what you plan to do. Beyond that, time commitments may differ considerably. We hope mentees will be able to commit the amount of time required to do the tasks they are interested in, and we hope mentors will be able to commit enough time to help out their mentees with their tasks. However, bearing in mind that people's lives and workloads can change, we recognize that people may have to vary their level of commitment at times.

If you have any problems with the mentoring program or with your mentor or mentee, you can contact Helen, and we will do our best to sort things out.

Currently active mentors and their areas of interest

  • Adeodato Simó
    packaging KDE packages, handling bug reports in packages
  • Akkana Peck
    writing bug reports, solving bugs and submitting packages, writing documentation
  • Alexander Schmehl
    packaging, writing documentation and bug reports, programming in shell, C++ and python
  • Anibal Monsalve Salazar
    Packaging, fixing bugs, C, Perl (also fluent in Spanish)
  • Brenda Butler
    C/C++, makefiles, shell programming (also fluent in French)
  • Bruce Byfield
    writing documentation
  • Christian Perrier
    writing bug reports, solving bugs and submitting patches, translation (also fluent in French)
  • Dafydd Harries
    packaging and maintaining packages, translation, reporting and solving bugs, writing documentation, C, Perl, Python, Ruby and shell (also fluent in Welsh)
  • David Nusinow
    writing bug reports and fixing bugs, packaging non-KDE stuff, writing documentation, Debian legal matters
  • Erinn Clark
    writing bug reports, bug triage and followup, general packaging and maintaining, cdbs, Perl, Debian sparc, general Debian interaction (also fluent in Spanish)
  • Felipe Augusto van de Wiel
    translation, writing documentation, working on Debian websites, working on Debian lists, general interaction within the Debian project (also fluent in Portugese and Spanish)
  • Gaudenz Steinlin
    packaging, the Debian installer (also fluent in German)
  • Hanna M. Wallach
    packaging and maintaining packages, general Debian questions
  • Helen Faulkner
    writing bug reports, general interaction within the Debian project, general Debian questions
  • Jérémy Bobbio
    shell scripts, makefiles, C, PHP, Python, Haskell (also fluent in French)
  • Jeroen van Wolffelaar
    Debian Quality Assurance
  • Luk Claes
    packaging, internationalization (also fluent in Dutch, French and German)
  • Miriam Ruiz
    beginner packaging, general C/C++ skills, PHP (also fluent in Spanish
  • Ricardo Mones
    packaging, fixing bugs, translation, C/C++, Pascal, Perl