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.)

Proposed Structure

Mailing List

In order to facilitate a community of peers and not just mentor-mentee relationships, we will create a private mailing list through which mentees can talk to each other. Part of their mentorship agreement will be to post at least once a month to this list, although hopefully they will post more often. Usage guidelines, including a code of conduct, will be given to students. These guidelines will not discourage off-topic conversation, as off-topic conversation can help list members connect with each other. Depending on how well people take to the list, I may or may not come up with a list of ice-breaker type prompts.

Hangouts & IRC Meetups

We will arrange monthly IRC meetups. These will be a chance for mentees to converse in real time.

Goal-setting Process

Mentees will work with their mentor to define one or more goals they want to meet as part of the mentorship program. Many students will likely choose "Apply to Google Summer of Code" (or a similar program) as their goal, but additional goals can include:

• Getting contributions merged. (Specific projects and kinds of contributions may vary - specificity is encouraged in goal-setting!)
• Help 3 newcomers to a project.
• Learn a particular skill such as git branching, resolving merge conflicts, or to achieve basic use a specific open source project such as R.
• Write an article about getting started in open source (and get it published on the OpenHatch blog, opensource.com, etc).
• Attend an in-person open source meetup.
• Make their own project open source and accessible to newcomers.

Students will be considered to have "graduated" when they successfully complete their stated goals.

Pairing

As part of achieving their goals, students will be encouraged to pair with their mentors and with each other. We will aim for one pairing experience per mentee per month, ideally starting early in the mentorship program.

Selection

How Mentors Are Selected

I'm planning to run a pilot of the mentorship program this fall with just myself (and potentially also Asheesh, as needed) as mentors. People who are interested in being mentors in future iterations of the program should contact Shauna.

How Mentees Are Selected

Mentees will fill out an application

Action Items

• Create application form for mentees.
• Create announcement to send to past students.
• Create mailing list & usage guidelines for mailing list.

Further reading

Planning post

Mentoring in Floss Resources

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)