and a commitment to be friendly to the students who are opening their first pull request.

This one is easy as that is already the expectation (and not just for students, for anyone opening any PR)!

In exchange, we'll need 30-45 minutes of time from a maintainer,

Adding this to our developer meeting agenda (unless someone wants to preemptively volunteer).

We'll also provide primary mentorship to the students.

That is good, the biggest problems we have had in the past with student programs like this is a wave of un-mentored first time contributors that over-saturates our ability to review PRs and mentor new contributors.

Thank you @tacaswell for your help! Please keep me updated if there's any interest from the developer meeting (you can directly email any contact info to me if desired).

That is good, the biggest problems we have had in the past with student programs like this is a wave of un-mentored first time contributors that over-saturates our ability to review PRs and mentor new contributors.

I'm also happy to provide partial examples of past mentored student contributions for reference/example. Ultimately, we want this program to be able to benefit both the students and the OSS community, so definitely let us know if you have other thoughts and suggestions to improve the quality of potential first-time contributors!

@itsmingjie We did not get to discussing this in more than passing on our call this week. Can you wait another week for an answer?

@tacaswell no worries! Just keep us updated. Thanks!

@itsmingjie What is your timeline for this?

At this point we do not have anyone who is able to commit the time we think would be required on our side to do your request justice. That said, if PRs come in from students they will be reviewed on a best effort-basis (just like any other PR!).

However, we are part of a recently funded grant from CZI (lead by @melissawm) that is funding Contributor Experience Leads across Matpoltlib, numpy, scipy, and pandas. Many of the goals of this grant (grant text ) align extremely well with what you are proposing (improving on boarding is literally in the job description!). Can we defer answering firmly either way until we have filled this position (the job posting just went up: https://quansight.breezy.hr/p/361a2e7da19b-contributor-experience-lead )?

I think once we have someone to fill the CEL role we will have a better idea for how we want to approach this.

As another point that came up in our discussions today is that historically contributors who are already Matplotlib users have had a much better time getting started as contributors (many of our problems are not "what is the right algorithm" but "what should this do?") and having experience with plotting and data visualization as a means to an ends in some other context is extremely useful!

We very much appreciate you reaching out to us ahead of time and are very supportive (in principle) of what you are doing 👍🏻

@tacaswell thanks for all this!

re: timeline -- We have one cohort starting this October, but our partners at CSU would love to do one each season. So if we can't work something out that quickly, we're happy to reach out again for the next one around February! And yup, feel free to defer solid responses until you are able to (congrats on the grant!)

re: new contributors -- totally! I'm confident that we'll have quite a few students who have some experience with it (I think it's quite widely taught in intro data science curriculum in college classrooms). We're happy to provide some context in that direction when we're suggesting projects to students.

Thanks for the kind words again -- just keep us updated when you have more information! In the meantime matplotlib remains something that we can suggest students contribute to with slightly less direct mentorship. We should also have some mentors who can help with higher-level/more generic questions.