Akademy/2025/KDE Needs You BoF

KNY🫵 BoF notes

Not sure of the names of all attendees but, the ones I do know were:

If I forgot someone, maybe most sincere apologies. Please ping me and I will add you to the list.

Kevin filled us in regarding of what we would need to do to be able to be considered as an option for the French universities hes has been talking too:
- We need to create a portfolio of 5 or 6 BIG projects (i.e. "Plasma", "Kdenlive", "Krita", "Frameworks", etc.)
- Ensure we have one point of KDE contact ("the guide/mentor") per project
- List 4 or 5 (maybe related) tasks per project for teams of between 4 and 6 students to work on
- The duration would be between 4 and 8 hours per week over period of 4 months
- The level can be anything between 1st year and 3rd year college degree
Leah and Viktoria are trying to found a group of "fans of KDE" in the University of Warsaw and would be very interested in us offering a SoK for their group
As mentioned, we have a contact now in 42Berlin (thanks Caro), a non-profit academy that teaches development to young people. Turns out we also have contacts in 42Madrid and 42Barcelona (thanks José Millán)
We Farid and Aniqa networked with Emilia, the person responsible for Qt Academy, a QT project to include Qt development in projects carried out be university students (in Norway?). We can propose projects for that and will be considered for inclusion as long as we can provide a mentor.
We also have, as mentioned elsewhere, groups of women hackers in Málaga interested, some contacts in Brazilian universities, and so on.
So it seems like that we have a solid base where we can get mentees from. The problem is...

Marketing internally to the community is the obvious answer
Albert suggested bring back mega-multisprints like the Randa meetings of yore, as people tended to float from one project to another in those. Include a mentorship sprint and invite some mentees and you may have people tempted to join in as a mentor
Cristoph told how demoralising it was to be a mentor and see how some mentees where only in it for the short term gains (i.e. GSoC money)
It was agreed that, as well as motivating mentees, we must find a way to motivate mentors. How this will be done is what we have to discuss (mentor badges? 🤷)

We talked briefly about the two sites we are making: the overhaul of mentorships.kde.org and the new join.kde.org
We talked about including "contribute to KDE", "sign up for a mentorship", "and locate an org that would benefit from our mentorships" as goals when attending external events
We talked about how we could use the Networks to find more candidates to recruit/mentor and, while we are at it, consolidate the national groups themselves with mentorship-like activities
We also talked about "soft-mentoring" where a group (like the folks from Warsaw university) can work on a project/task, helping each other and have a guide from KDE for when they get stuck. We can guide them to something that may be useful and interesting, but no hard deadlines or anything like that