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

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi Shauna!


On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
>
>
I think this is a  great thing to try.

Maybe this is something that, over time, we can see if we can automate. No
need to necessarily do that immediately, but something to keep in mind; as
you run into pain points, don't forget to store them somewhere.

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.)

* 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.)

* 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.

* 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.

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.

That's my take!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/osctc-planning/attachments/20140810/42588efd/attachment.html>