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

[Heidi Ellis]

Hi Folks,

Sumana's post has caused me to think and also generated some questions.  I know Mel, Shauna, and Sumana at least a bit, Mel better than Shauna and Sumana. However, all three of these folks have what I might call an outgoing spirit.  In group settings, you all actively engage people and are very good at asking the right questions to get people (and newbies) to talk with you. I have seen all three of you successfully convince people that they can contribute to open source projects in useful ways and I am in awe of your abilities in this area. 

So now the questions.  Do you think that this willingness to engage people and active interaction is a necessary condition for at least the initial stages of mentoring?  How does this willingness play out in mentoring?  And does this play out differently in face-to-face meetings versus online? 

It makes me wonder about the synergy between personality styles and learning styles. 

Heidi 

-----Original Message-----
From: osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org [mailto:osctc-planning-bounces at lists.openhatch.org] On Behalf Of Sumana Harihareswara
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 11:59 AM
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

Hey, I'm sorry it's taken a while for me to say on list something I said to Shauna earlier. This is rambly and not necessarily apposite but I figure it's better to make sure I've said it here!

One Perl/OpenBSD person who'd just attended his first PyCon said:

https://twitter.com/AFresh1/status/454991682036314112

> The common theme I notice at #PyCon is the focus that community will 
> bring technical excellence rather than the other way in #Perl and #BSD

which rings true to me.

I'm sure Mel can talk our ears off about cognitive apprenticeship, legitimate peripheral participation, http://blog.melchua.com/2012/04/12/cognitive-apprenticeship-case-studies-in-software-engineering/
and other key concepts in creating learning environments.

I totally agree that socialization and identity formation are KEY in helping people contribute to FLOSS, or develop any new hobby. I'd love for us to research best practices in missiology/Communism/Amway/dissident movements/skateboarding/garage rock/Zumba/etc. so we could use them in FLOSS. We aren't the first to need to do this.

My PyCon poster (mentorship lessons I learned from Hacker School) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Be_A_Better_Mentor_-_What_Hacker_School_Taught_Me_About_Community_Mentoring.pdf
might be a useful thing to look at.

Mentors in FOSS need to help mentees learn *what is normal* in a world that's upside-down for most folks, and they need to be able to help extremely diverse new folks bootstrap. (We aim to give people something real to do as they bootstrap - what? There's one evergreen task that a mentor can give - writing a discovery report on installation or new dev environment setup or something like that https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/25/seeing-through-the-eyes-of-new-technical-contributors/
- and SpinachCon looks promising.)

The people who are hesitant about applying to OPW/GSoC because they don't know whether they are ready enough: some subset of those people have impostor syndrome and need actual facts so they can measure themselves against objective criteria. Maybe OH can help them self-assess on FLOSS skills.

Looking forward to hearing what others have to say,

rambly Sumana

--
Sumana Harihareswara
http://www.harihareswara.net/
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