• Home /
• MentorProgrammeApplication

Mentoring Programme Application Procedure¶

Applying for the Apache Mentoring Programme is simple. This page will take you through the steps:

Creating a proposal and finding a mentor¶

1. Find the project you are interested in (see our FAQ for some guidance on how to do this)
2. Examine the projects issue tracker to find bugs that need fixing or features that need implementing that you feel you can tackle
3. Join the projects mailing list and post an introduction mail (something like this mentor request mail will do nicely).
4. Liaise with the project mailing list to refine your proposal
5. Write up your project proposal (see next section) and submit it to the project mailing list asking for someone to be your mentor.

Project proposal¶

Your project proposal should include:

• Your full name
• Apache Project of interest
• Name of mentor
• Planned start date
• Expected mid-term evaluation date
• End date
• Expected deliverables
• Expected benefits to the Apache Community as a result of your work
• Detailed description and high level design for your proposed solution
• Approximate number of hours you intend to work on the project each week and the number of weeks you expect it to take
• A description of why you want to undertake this project and what you hope to gain from it and the mentor programme
• A brief CV of your skills

Note, we do not expect people to come to our mentor programme with a full armoury of skills, however mentors are not their to teach you only to guide you. You must be willing and able to put in the effort to learn any new skills needed. This programme is designed to help people engage with Apache projects. However, we do expect people to have sufficient technical skills to understand the guidance that the mentor and project community will provide. We are not here to teach basic programming skills, rather we are here to teach the application of those skills to an Apache Project.

Applying to the mentoring programme¶

At this point you will probably want to apply to the Community Development mentoring programme, however, you are not required to do so. If you so desire you can just get on with your work within the project community, after all, you already generated enough interest in your work to have the community offer to mentor you.

The advantage of joining the mentoring programme formally is that you have access to a growing community of people who have recently done exactly what you are doing. That is you are trying to figure out how to efficiently participate in a community developed software project.

Whilst the project the project community are there to help you with project specific issues you may face they are sometimes less willing to help guide you through the processes and tools available to you within the broader Apache community. That's where the Community Development project comes in. We are here to help with issues that are not project specific.

To make us aware of your work in the ASF we request that you formally become a part of the mentoring programme. To do so all you need to do is:

1. Join the Community development mailing list at dev@community.apache.org mailing list by sending a mail to mailto:dev-subscribe@community.apache.org (this is where we coordinate all mentoring efforts)
2. Submit your project proposal (see above) to the community development issue tracker
3. Have your mentor "sign off" the proposal (i.e. indicate in a comment that they are willing to mentor the proposal)
4. That's it, you are ready to go. Start work under the guidance of your mentor.

If you have any problems during the application process or during the mentoring programme simply ask for advice on the project mailing list first, if that doesn't solve your problem then ask on the dev@community.apache.org list (note project specific issues should be kept to the project list).