Mentoring

This may eventually be a splash page with mentee-facing information about the mentoring program, but for now, it's a planning document.

Brief Summary of Goals

The mentoring program is meant to help those who are interested in open source transition from one-off event to more regular participation in open source.

Our Students' Needs

More instruction/repetition on the skills we teach at our events (IRC, version control, issue trackers, etc.)

Help finding good projects (learning which ones exist, how to evaluate them, benefiting from our community's informal knowledge about which projects are most welcoming/responsive, etc)

Help understanding community norms and structures that may be otherwise invisible (how long is normal for someone to respond to you and is it okay to ping them again, how FOSS projects functions without deadlines and assignments in an academic sense, development environment setup is frequently difficult it's not just you, FOSS can be harder for reflective learners than active learners, etc)

A social network to increase feelings of belonging and enjoyment of participation. (Peers at a similar level of experience, role models who they can identify with and who feel approachable, a source of positive feedback for their work not just from the projects they're contributing to, a sense of shared values, a place to turn when they feel discouraged or like an impostor).

Help finding "easy wins" to increase feelings of competence and belonging. (An easy win may be fixing an issue for a specific project we've helped them find, but could also involve helping others, or doing setup sprints or user feedback or other contributions that rely on and require their new-ness.)

Help setting achievable goals. (Many students want to apply for GSoC/OPW but are intimidated, most aren't sure what they can contribute to a given project at their experience/skill level, many are confused/concerned about what kind of time commitment they're making, etc.)

Goals

Obstacles

lack of time, difficulty finding a good project match, imposter syndrome (especially re: programs like GSoC but also contributing generally), integrating into the community

Structure

- mailing list and monthly IRC meetings: build community, allow me to keep track of/follow up with students - IRC meetings with individual recommended projects? - activities that are more thorough than we can do at workshops? - remote pair programming/mentoring (prob need to get a list of people to mentor)

Still need to address a lot of the obstacles...