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

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Pushing this forward: I think I'd like to do a small pilot program with the
"short pairing meetings" model.  I've drawn up an application form here and
would appreciate feedback:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qLNLnWW_TshbJYD8idWA4qxmuHr8WY9-EJukHgF5LCg/viewform

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>>>
>> 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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>>
>
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