Daniel McCloy
I am a developer of open-source scientific software, and a scientist trained in acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and auditory neuroscience. My scientific interest broadly centers on the perception and representation of speech sounds. I'm (probably) most known for my work on 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.