Governance Taskforce Recommendation "Expand Onboarding and Mentoring to Increase Contributor Pipeline"

A healthy contributor pipeline requires a capacity to effectively onboard and mentor community members. Many groups told us they are struggling with declining volunteer and participant numbers. This leads to difficulties with succession planning and volunteer burnout. We must act.

What we heard:

We know from the latest review of the data on contribution that the contribution profile is changing: the shift from volunteer predominance to sponsored individuals is just one example. However, comparable with general trends in the sector, sponsored contributors are less likely to be from marginalized or minority groups, which may adversely skew our demographic profile data for contributors. This hampers our efforts to encourage diversity. The same data also shows that at least eighty percent of Drupal contributors identify as male, with the percentage of female contributors only increasing by one percentage point per year over the last two years. New action for community engagement and adoption is required, and it needs funding.

Improving diversity and fostering inclusion for marginalized and minority groups offers tangible pragmatic benefits: it significantly expands the talent pipeline, contributing to the sustainability and growth of the Drupal project.

What we recommend:

To invite the creation of new ways of engaging, onboarding, and mentoring new people, we recommend an initiative to explore effective methods to achieve those goals that is both funded and actively marketed. Such an initiative would help with succession planning, reduce burnout, and can help to foster new community leaders. An initiative may yield ideas, like partnering with other groups that already promote diversity and inclusion but may not be familiar with Drupal.

We commend the efforts of Drupal’s existing Mentoring Program, which works to support the needs of contributors, and recommend that the efforts of the mentoring program be expanded and made more visible. For example, a buddy system pairing up new contributors with mentors established in their specific subject area might be one way to bolster the human connection, lower the barrier of entry, and help newcomers navigate our community.

We need to be able to measure progress, and while we have data that tells us some of the story we do not have the whole picture. Data helps keep people accountable and shows transparency. We recommend an ongoing focus on analyzing the data we do have, to identify and resolve the limitations of what we collect, and to work on solutions to ensure all community contributions are recognized.