The goal of the live pair-programming sessions

Recently I've started to have live pair programming sessions working on Open Source projects.

However I keep asking myself: What is my goal with these live pair programming sessions?

A couple of things came to my mind:

• Gain more experience in pair programming.
• Promote the idea if pair programming.
• Introduce more people to open source development.
• Encourage people to mentor each others via pair programming of open source applications.
• Get people talk about their projects and maybe help them find more contributors..
• Encourage more people from minority groups to contribute to open source projects and by that help them improve their chances for employment.

Several types of these events

Find an open source project and ask the author (or one of the authors) if they want to have a session in which first they introduce their project and then we work on some issue in the project. For example we add tests. Write examples on how to use the project. Write some documentation. Fix a bug. Add some documentation.

Alternatively, I have a number of Open Source projects. I could invite people to help me work on these projects. The question though why would they want to work on those projects?

People who are interested in contributing to Open Source, but don't how. We can pick a project in the technology that person is familiar with and work on that.

I could find someone very knowledgeable about a certain technology who would direct me in using it. For example authors or power users of certain frameworks certain libraries. People who are experts in a programming language I don't know, but I would like to learn.

Who should participate?

• Shall I invite people I already know? That's easier, but the pool is small and it is very biased towards the communities I participated in.
• Shall I reach out to others and invite them? That's scary. For both of us.

So what do I do?

I guess I have been mixing all of the above. I contacted primarily people whom I already know on some level. It is much easier among people who write Perl as I know many people there, but that at the end it is a very small bubble.

I need a better strategy.