Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use can help OSS projects better support mentors’ work. In this paper, we employ a two-stage study to comprehensively investigate mentors in OSS. First, we identify the characteristics of mentors in the Apache Software Foundation, a large OSS community, using an online survey. We found that less experienced volunteer contributors are less likely to take on the mentorship role. Second, through interviews with OSS mentors (n=18), we identify the challenges that mentors face and how they mitigate them. In total, we identified 25 general mentorship challenges and 7 sub-categories of challenges regarding task recommendation. We also identified 13 strategies to overcome the challenges related to task recommendation. Our results provide insights for OSS communities, formal mentorship programs, and tool builders who design automated support for task assignment and internship.

中文翻译：

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成为开源项目的导师

指导是一种众所周知的方式，可以帮助开源软件 (OSS) 项目的新手克服最初的贡献障碍。通过指导，新人学习获得必要的技术、社交和组织技能。尽管 OSS 导师很重要，但他们在文献中的研究不足。了解 OSS 项目导师是谁、他们面临的挑战以及他们使用的策略可以帮助 OSS 项目更好地支持导师的工作。在本文中，我们采用两阶段研究来全面调查 OSS 中的导师。首先，我们使用在线调查确定了 Apache 软件基金会（一个大型 OSS 社区）中导师的特征。我们发现经验不足的志愿者贡献者不太可能担任指导角色。其次，通过对OSS导师的采访（n=18），我们确定导师面临的挑战以及他们如何缓解这些挑战。总的来说，我们确定了 25 个一般指导挑战和 7 个关于任务推荐的挑战子类别。我们还确定了 13 种策略来克服与任务推荐相关的挑战。我们的结果为 OSS 社区、正式的导师计划和为任务分配和实习设计自动化支持的工具构建者提供了见解。