[OSCTC-planning] mentorship and other ways to follow up with Open Source Comes to Campus attendees

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

>
>
>>
> My brief experience with online mentorship efforts suggests they benefit
> from as many of the following as are possible:
>
> * The mentee has specific work that a mentor should provide comment on.
> (For pairing, the mentor can provide this, or the mentee can.)
>

I think the proposed structure, where mentees pick a specific task/goal,
should address this.  Note that this requires mentees to have a sense of
what kind of tasks are possible, but I plan to have a set of tasks to
choose from (finding a project, reproducing a bug, learning about the OPW
or GSoC application process, etc) with the option to define your own task.


> * The mentor and mentee form a bond and get to know each other. (This is
> possible on a big mailing list and also possible through off-list
> communication.) (I think pairing is great for this.)
>
> Agreed.



> * We should avoid standard failures on the mentors' sides, like having too
> many people who they kind of want to mentor but haven't picked any one
> person in particular and therefore become overwhelmed and stop finding our
> system a useful way to find mentees. This is basically a failure mode that
> the debian-mentors email list suffers from frequently.
>

So my proposed structure has a mentor and mentee pairing for one session at
a time, with no commitment on either end to pair another session (although
that would certainly be possible).  This allows mentors to commit time as
they have it, and gives mentees the chance to meet multiple potential
mentors.  Of course, there are downsides to this model as well.



>
> * We should avoid standard failures from the mentee sides, like having
> mentors that enthusiastically sign up but then fail to actually meet with
> the mentee. This is a failure mode that many one-on-one mentorship efforts
> suffer from.
>

Ideally when they sign up to mentor someone they're committing to a
specific time and date.  Ideally there is also a way for us to keep track
of things like no-shows so we can ask the mentor to step back from the
program.  We'll want to make sure we have the ability to deal with CoC
violations, so we'll be doing the work there anyway.



>
> A question is, how will we connect those who want mentorship with those
> who are plausible mentees? To avoid having too much demand on one side or
> the other, I'd recommend thinking of it as a queue and not as a mailing
> list, where you can periodically say things like "We're not taking new
> mentees right now" because there isn't the mentorship resource available.
> That way, people who participate don't have a bad experience.
>
>
I agree, although potentially there could be a waiting list.



> That's my take!
>
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