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

Fri Aug 1 16:10:23 UTC 2014

Hi Shauna,

I like this idea a lot!  The one thing that wasn’t clear until the end of the email is that the pairing is once for a specific amount of time, not a longer-term pairing.

Google is having some of their female employees mentor high school students. They have a system where each employee has a picture, brief bio and list of skills. The high school (or other) students can contact them directly. Sort of a “gallery of experts”.  This might be a long-term goal as it would reduce your overhead in having to pair folks.

Just thinking off the top of my head…
Heidi

From: osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org [mailto:osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org] On Behalf Of Shauna Gordon-McKeon
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2014 6:01 PM
To: Planning for Open Source Comes to Campus
Subject: Re: [OSCTC-planning] mentorship and other ways to follow up with Open Source Comes to Campus attendees

I've been continuing to think about this.

Something I've really enjoyed doing lately is pairing.  I've paired with several different members of the OpenHatch community, both as a mentor and a mentee, and I've gotten a ton out of it.  I'd like to encourage more pairing in the community.

There's a reason I'm saying "pairing" and not "pair programming".  While most of the pairing I've done has been technical, it doesn't have to be to be.  I'd like to promote "pair participating" which would be defined as two people working in real time together on a specific task - whether that is "fixing a bug" or "going through a tutorial" or "improving some documentation" or "picking a project and learning more about it" or "identifying a goal to work towards".  The pair doesn't have to have a mentor-mentee dynamic.  I think both kinds of pairing have a special and different value.

Here's a new proposal:

OpenHatch creates a new mailing list for pair participation.  Before joining the list, people fill out a form where they list skills or tasks they're interested in, and say whether they want to pair with someone who can mentor them on it, whether they want to be the mentor, or whether they'd like to work with someone who is also new on that skill.  (These three things are obviously not exclusive.)  I imagine on this form we'd list some common skills/tasks people ask about as well as providing free forms for skills.

Folks could ask for people to pair with them directly to the list, or they could ask me to match them up with someone using the form data people submitted.  The latter I think would be especially useful for finding pairs for things like "Applying to Google Summer of Code" or "Finding a project I feel comfortable contributing to" or "Overcoming my impostor syndrome" which might require a more experienced and trusted mentor.

Why I like this approach:
- It promotes pairing.  Yay, pairing!
- It's goal oriented.  There are concrete tasks that people are working on, even if the concrete task is abstract and interpersonal.  We know when we've succeeded.
- It's low commitment for both mentors and mentees.  You commit to doing one pair session at a time.
- It allows people to share skills as they gain them.  The focus is not on one type of person (a mentor) helping another type of person (a newcomer) but on someone who has a skill sharing that skill.  This allows newcomers to share their own skills right away, and to turn around and help others in the way they've been helped.

What do folks think?

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com<mailto:shaunagm at gmail.com>> wrote:
There's no particular need to rush on this.

There could be a lot of value just in inviting people to take an open survey and publishing/discussing the results.

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Heidi Ellis <ellis at wne.edu<mailto:ellis at wne.edu>> wrote:
+1
But I’m working on a paper for the next few days….

From: osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org<mailto:osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org> [mailto:osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org<mailto:osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org>] On Behalf Of Shauna Gordon-McKeon
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2014 1:35 PM

To: Planning for Open Source Comes to Campus
Subject: Re: [OSCTC-planning] mentorship and other ways to follow up with Open Source Comes to Campus attendees

Hmmm.  We could write a guide or blog post about this.  Perhaps invite contributions/suggestions from people who've done online mentoring about what to look for?  I imagine people who do OPW and GSoC would have a lot to say about this.

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 11:33 AM, sheila miguez <shekay at pobox.com<mailto:shekay at pobox.com>> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com<mailto:shaunagm at gmail.com>> wrote:
I think it probably depends on the mentee - there are certainly introverted people who'd prefer a calmer, quieter approach than I'd instinctively provide them - but yes, I think *generally* speaking the ability to be outgoing and actively engaged, is important.  Is it more important than other abilities, such as empathy, creativity, and the ability to explain things well?  I'm not sure.

I also think you're right to differentiate online and in person mentoring on this dimension.  I think more quiet, passive mentors might be able to push themselves to interact and ask questions via online mediums in a way that's hard to in person.  One can also introduce easier-to-evaluate metrics that way, by asking a mentor, "How many email threads have you initiated?" "How many questions has your mentee asked you?" "What kinds of questions does your mentee tend to ask?" etc.  There's more opportunity for reflection because you have the record of communication.

I'd definitely love to learn more about this. I find it much easier to talk to people online, and can help in that manner, but that is not to say that I don't want to get better at in-person interactions.

If people know resources for building up that skill for people who may be shy or have confidence issues (like myself), please share.
One thing I've been trying is watching how other people do this. I don't often get a chance to do this since I'll end up helping instead of watching. This means I am not sure how effective watching other mentors is.

--
shekay at pobox.com<mailto:shekay at pobox.com>

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