Skip to content

Contribute to the Open Mentorship Handbook

A young black man in the Cameroon 1,000 interns celebration writes down some ideas with pen and paper.

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Open Mentorship Handbook! This page will help you understand the ins-and-outs of submitting contributions of any nature to this handbook.

Technologies used

Our handbook is written primarily in Markdown, with a couple of HTML excerpts to create more complex structures such as card grids on the homepage. It's built with Zensical, a documentation system created by the team behind the very successful Material for MkDocs. Although Zensical doesn't offer full feature parity to MkDocs yet, we chose to use it as a future-proofing measure because MkDocs 2.0 doesn't fit our needs as well as Zensical.

Warning

As of mid-2026, Zensical supports very basic internationalization and localization features. We're currently waiting for the implementation of full compatibility with MkDocs internationalization and localization plugins on Zensical to encourage localization and internationalization contributions.

Our handbook repository is currently hosted on GitLab, and we deploy this website via GitLab Pages. A new commit to the protected main branch triggers a new deployment.

Contribution mechanisms

Work items

Work items are the GitLab equivalent of GitHub issues. You can create a new work item, work on an existing work item and/or participate in work item discussions.

If you intend to work on a specific work item, please announce your intention in the work item comments to let others know. If someone else is already working on a work item you're interested in, we encourage you to reach out to them to see if you can work together on it!

Merge requests

Merge requests are the GitLab equivalent of GitHub pull requests. We require merge requests to be associated with an existing work item.

Usage of any AI tools should be appropriately disclosed on merge requests — failure to exercise diligence in contributions will result in an automatic merge rejection. Allowed AI usage cases include spell checking and text revision of your contributions. We don't allow the use of AI-generated images in this handbook. Uses not explicitly listed in this section should be discussed under a designated work item.

New content suggestions

  • Improving existing handbook chapters and sections
  • Suggesting new chapters and sections
  • Showcasing your open mentorship program by submitting it as a case study

Submitting a case study

Please include the following information in your case study:

  • Metadata such as online presence, years of activity, country
  • Classification according to the open mentorship taxonomy
  • Overview of the program or initiative
  • Structure of the program or initiative
  • Results of the program or initiative
  • Challenges, old or current