School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 17;17(8):e0272764. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272764. eCollection 2022.
Mentoring has been a subject of study for 50 years. Most studies of mentoring programs evaluate the effect of the program on the participants but do not evaluate if different mentors have different effects on mentees. Open-source software (OSS) is software with a license that allows it to be freely used by other people. Such software has become foundational to the world economy. However, many OSS projects get abandoned by their creators. Various nonprofit organizations have arisen to help OSS projects become sustainable. One of the key services offered by many of these nonprofit organizations is a mentorship program where experienced OSS developers advise nascent projects on how to achieve sustainability. We use data from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program where 303 mentors have mentored 286 projects, with most mentoring more than one project, to address this question: Is who a project has as a mentor associated with variation in project success? Who a project has as a mentor accounts for 45% of the variation in project outcomes, with some mentors being associated with positive and some with negative outcomes. These mentors could offer insights into how to improve the mentoring program. This result also demonstrates, more broadly, that the nature of specific mentoring relationships may be important to understanding how mentors impact outcomes in other mentoring programs.
指导已经成为研究课题 50 年了。大多数指导计划的研究评估了该计划对参与者的影响，但没有评估不同的导师对学员是否有不同的影响。开源软件（OSS）是一种许可证允许其他人自由使用的软件。这种软件已经成为世界经济的基础。然而，许多 OSS 项目的创建者已经放弃了这些项目。各种非营利组织已经出现，以帮助 OSS 项目实现可持续性。这些非营利组织中的许多组织提供的一项关键服务是指导计划，其中有经验的 OSS 开发人员为新生项目提供如何实现可持续性的建议。我们使用了来自 Apache 软件基金会孵化器计划的数据，其中 303 位导师指导了 286 个项目，大多数导师指导了不止一个项目，以解决这个问题：项目的导师是谁与项目成功的变化有关？项目的导师是谁占项目结果变化的 45%，有些导师与积极的结果有关，有些则与消极的结果有关。这些导师可以提供如何改进指导计划的见解。这一结果更广泛地表明，特定指导关系的性质对于理解导师如何影响其他指导计划的结果可能很重要。
