Season of KDE 2026 - Improving mentorship.kde.org for better onboarding of new contributors
Greeting everyone! I am Aryan.
I have only just started my open source journey and was glad to be a part of SOK program. I really learned a lot which I think I otherwise would have not. With this blog I will be sharing about the project I worked on and also my learnings and future endeavour.
For the last 2 months me and my fellow partner Advaith SK worked on ways on how to improve the existing mentorship.kde.org so that it is more accessible and user friendly for new contributors as well as we tried to structure the internals of the website for better code readability and resuabililty.
Why was this project relevant
mentorship.kde.org is basically the first page a new contributor visits when exploring about KDE. So it is very important for the website to not overwhelm the new contrbutor but provide all the relevant information and links in a ordered and systematic way.
What problems did I identify
We noticed a gap in the project, KDE organizes many programs throughout the year for mentoring and developing more and more contributors. But we noticed that there was no single page that lists all the relevant programs a candidate might be interested in. Moreover on the developer's side we noticed that the repo of mentorship.kde.org is using many different cards for displaying its data throughout, and each card was schematically different than the others but in the end all of them were pretty much serving the same purpose.
What were the solutions
To solve this, I built a separate /programs page for the website, whose task is to only list all the programs that KDE organizes throughout the year. And to solve the developer's side problem, I standardized the cards. So basically for each component using their own rules for displaying cards, what I changed was I implemented a central card.html and card.scss which governs all cards. In case of some variations required I introduced the $variants feature of Hugo to carefully keep the uniqueness of cards required for each page.
Merge requests
Miscellaneous
I also noticed that in the resoruces page, the resources listed are relatively few, moreover the hyperlinks provided were also not updated. So I added more resources there and also updated the broken links present previously.
Future work
To attract more new contributors, in future we can also extend our project to have a hall of fame section where there is list of blogs of all graduated students of a particular program.
Final thoughts
A big thank you to my mentors, drowsywings and paulb, for thoughtful guidance and constant support throughout the project.
I have grown in this season with more confidence, more curiosity, and even more appreciation for the people behind free software infrastructure. I will be proud even if this work helps just one curious contributor to get onboard with the KDE ecosystem.