Mentors matter: Association of mentors with project success in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator

# Description

Many Open-Source Software Foundations have Incubator programs, which take nascent OSS projects and shepherd them to long-term sustainability. One of the key functions of Incubators is to provide advice and guidance from experienced people in OSS to help projects. Nearly all such mentorship is volunteer-based and programs are almost always looking for mentors to help with projects. Due to the nature of these organizations as flat, volunteer-run, there is little support provided to mentors to help them best guide new projects. We use a large dataset of hundreds of mentors that have mentored hundreds of projects in teams of usually 3-5 mentors, with most mentors mentoring multiple projects, to look at individual variation in guiding projects to long-term sustainability.

# Findings

Who a project has as a part of their mentorship team accounts for 45% of the variation in long-term sustainability.
There are distinct populations of mentors with positive and negative effects on projects.
Mentors with a moderate level of experience are most associated with lower probabilities of long-term sustainability.
These findings indicate that Foundations with mentorship programs could benefit from working with mentors that are often associated with project success to develop training materials for all mentors, as well as carefully composing mentorship teams.

# Paper

The paper can be found here.