Consider offering mentorship to grantees

[vladh]

On our kick-off call, Mark and @jring-o commented that we might want to offer not just financial grants, but also non-monetary support to grantees.

Some questions come up:

• Would mentorship be valuable to grantees?
• Can we expect our member-donors to allocate time to mentor grantees?
• Can we allocate money from the Open Source Endowment Foundation to pay our mentors? Can we think of a ballpark amount that we should be able to afford paying before this is realistic?

[GitMensch]

Yes, that would definitely be useful, especially for maintainers where funding is (currently) "kind of covered" (allowing them to allocate time) but the hard issues are typical maintainer questions like "how do I ensure the community is a positive place where people help each others, how do I build up mentors for the project, how do I weight issues (and possibly also the project and the personal live), how can planning work with people coming and going,..."

You may be able to benefit from the experience of the fellowship program from the German Sovereign Tech Agency.
https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fellowship