I only wonder if we should go beyond this to offer a diversity officer who could coach people to contribute, or at least providing a contact address to get support would make this sound less tokenistic.

I think having any form of mentoring would be great. The question is just who would/could be doing it. I wouldn't be opposed but honestly where I am right now I'm not sure I'll be responsive enough (or rather I'm pretty sure I wouldn't).

Re tokenistic: I trust @nmsanchez in saying this is a useful addition. Obviously any statement by itself will not be meaningful if our interactions don't reflect the intent.

Btw, I think with the addition this is ok, but the previous statement to treat everybody equally might not have been ideal. We might not want to treat an inexperienced contributor that had to work up a lot of nerve to send a PR the same way we would treat a core-dev.

I'd be more than happy to help. I don't think it'd be too much traffic for now. But I agree that saying how they can reach out to us for mentorship would help.

We could have a "scikit-learn-mentors" mailing list and have whoever's interested in there, and then say something along the lines "please contact our mentoring team if you're unsure of how to proceed.", or similar.

Btw, I think with the addition this is ok, but the previous statement to treat everybody equally might not have been ideal. We might not want to treat an inexperienced contributor that had to work up a lot of nerve to send a PR the same way we would treat a core-dev.

@amueller , the statement is totally relevant: you should treat core-devs and anybody else respectfully, exactly as you would treat an inexperienced contributor. That's what make a community welcoming. If I look at public exchanges and I feel that people involved are not respectful of each other, I will not contribute to that community.

Should we say that we aim to foster a collaborative env where everybody feels equally welcome and valued then?

@cmarmo Thanks, I totally agree with your point.

I think I was thinking more in terms of level of guidance. I would probably provide less detail and guidance to a core dev. If I get a PR from a new developer that's lacking tests, I might (or maybe should and currently don't) say "Could you please add a regression test [link to wikipedia]. The tests for this file are in XXX and you can use the tests in this file as a starting point. Please let me know if you have any question about that."

If I look at a PR from @jnothman that doesn't have tests, I know he knows that he needs to add tests for it to get merged and I might ask "Do you want a review before adding tests?".

I think there's also some US/Europe mismatch of which words are used around diversity. In the US I think an important point that is being made is that different groups have different needs and that treating everybody the same is bad. I'm still culturally an outsider to the US and I might not have an accurate picture, but my impression is that many people make the argument that treating people of different ethnicity the same is racist and not respecting cultural differences and differences in lived experience also see colorblindness.

merge?

@thomasjpfan merge? I addressed your comment.