Mentorship and outreach programs are often considered side projects in both academia and the industry. Although they are a nice way to spend time and have some fun, one may say they rarely add new long-term contributors to a company project or a community, and that they are not always beneficial to students, especially on the Master and PhD level. Is this true? Or do we just

Let’s talk about organizing mentorship programs in partnership between open source projects and universities. How such contributions help to grow your current community and contributors, and how do they How to involve students and higher education orgs into wider community efforts? And what can they get from it? Let’s talk about various program types: from wide outreach programs like GSoC, individual mentorship programs or wide-reach programs like Hacktoberfest that can be leveraged by researchers. I will share some examples from my open source projects and Swiss universities, for example GSoC in the Free and Open Source Silicon foundation together with ETH Zurich.