Thank you all for your patience - the work group is small, so it took us a while to send all of the messages out 
The Diversity in Swift work group has finished notifying people of their mentorship matches! There was an overwhelming amount of interest in the program, with 385 interested mentees and 38 potential mentors. As some mentors volunteered to have more than one mentee, we have 41 mentorship pairs for this pilot round, and a total of 77 participants!
Unfortunately, given the sheer volume of interest surveys, it is not feasible for the work group to personally message everybody who we were not able to match. We’re looking into alternative submission mechanisms or possible automated Discourse responses for next time to make the submission process a better experience. If you have not received a private message on the Swift Forums with your match, we were unable to match you with a mentor for one of the following reasons:
- There was not a suitable mentor to help you with your goals. For example, a number of different people were specifically interested in contributing to Swift Algorithms or Swift Collections, and none of the mentors have experience contributing to these projects.
- There were not enough mentors to help with your area of interest.
- The work group did not have enough information about your goals to be able to effectively match you with a mentor to help you. More on this point below.
We hope that this pilot program is the first of many mentorship offerings, and we encourage everyone to keep an eye out for future offerings of the program.
To conduct the matching process, we first categorized responses from both the mentors and mentees into one of: Compiler/Language Design, Server, SPM/Tooling, and General Swift. For each mentor, we filtered the mentee responses based on the category or specific open source project mentioned by the mentor (e.g., one mentor maintains Swift Package Index, and several mentees specifically mentioned interest in contributing to this project). We then looked at the goals of the potential mentees and made a list of potential matches based on the mentor’s experience. As the goal of the program is to lower the barrier to entry, we prioritized people who noted significant or specific barriers to contributing that the mentor is equipped to help with.
By far, the most common barrier cited in the interest surveys is not knowing where to start. We’ve taken this as feedback that the onboarding and StarterBug process for the Swift project is really hard to navigate individually, and we’re looking for ways to make this more approachable. If you have tried to contribute a StarterBug fix without success and you have specific feedback, we’d love to hear about your experience.
Another lesson that we learned during the matching process is that potential mentees who wrote about specific goals for the program were the easiest to match with a mentor. Many folks specified that their goal is to make contributions to any open source project with the help of any mentor which, while a great goal, didn’t give the work group much information about what specifically the person is looking for out of the mentorship program. For future iterations of the program, we will provide more guidance on goal-writing with examples.
We will update the community again about how the pilot round went and showcase some of the mentees’ accomplishments when the program ends in September.
As I mentioned above, we intend for this to be the first of many offerings of the Swift Mentorship Program. The lessons that we learn from facilitating the pilot round will help us improve future iterations of the program. We're also open to insight from all of you - please feel free to message @diversity-workgroup with any feedback that you have about the program!