Britta Westner
I am an Assistant Professor at the Donders Institute and Radboudumc in The Netherlands. My current research focuses mainly on the intersection of language and memory. I work with human electrophysiological data and have a focus on data analysis methods such as source reconstruction and decoding. I am enthusiastic about open source and am part of the core developer team of MNE-Python since 2019. Since 2024, I am also part of the newly-formed steering council of MNE-Python.
Session
MNE-Python is open-source software for analyzing electrophysiological data in neuroscience. Like many projects, we struggle to retain maintainers. Finding maintainers in our user community is hard; most have little formal training in programming. To address this, we organized progressive training sprints with open applications and a participation stipend. Currently, we are onboarding four alumni of those sprints as new maintainers. We’ve seen positive outcomes from this approach, but at a high cost. We are now developing a curriculum for future onboarding efforts. We hope to spark discussions with other project leaders about their efforts toward educating and retaining talented maintainers.