Brainstorming

[bheklilr]

Ideas of what this website can be

• Learn about the mission statement
• Sign up to be a Python Mentor on Twitter/Reddit/elsewhere
• People who need help can search for mentors by category, skill level, language, other
• Allow people to click a button to say that they were helped by an individual mentor. Don't update anything unless the mentor confirms. Should be doable without login for the person helped.

[bheklilr]

Visiting the home page

The first thing that they see should be the mission statement. The general gist being:

Increase collaboration, openness, and camaraderie in the Python developer community by
encouraging developers to open up their DMs on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media
sites so they can act as mentors to others.

Followed by "Find a Mentor" search field/link.

Below the fold have the inspiration for this project, specifically http://testandcode.com/36, with a bit of info about how we got started.

Show count of mentors and number of people helped.

Invitation to join as a mentor. This isn't a site to get mentored, it's a site to advertise that you are willing to be a mentor and where you can be contacted.

[bheklilr]

Find a Mentor

Should allow for pretty basic searching:

• By name
• By discipline/fields
• By spoken language
• By social media platform

[bheklilr]

Join as a Mentor

Standard sign up page. Should ask for

• Preferred contact name
• Spoken languages (will need to find a good list for this). Allow multiple
• Choose discipline tags. Initially should just be a static list, but eventually look into allowing user defined.
• Social media handles. Start with Twitter. Maybe add Reddit, email, Skype, any others?
• Maybe password? Could just use 1-time link login by sending as DM to social media account. It's a little annoying, but it keeps this website easier and safer to build. No passwords to have compromised.
• No profile pics to start with.

Once signed up, each platform should be sent a verification link separately. This part will be more complicated, but is vital IMO.

[bheklilr]

View a Mentor

• Show their contact info, with links to go directly to sending them a DM.
• Don't show their "Mentored" count.
• Show a button for "This person mentored me in ____". Allow multiple?

Clicking the button that indicates that you were mentored will prompt for a short message, and the mentor will be sent a verification email.

The reasoning behind why we don't want to show the mentored counts by individual is because this will make it feel too much like a game, and people looking for help would just go for the person with the highest number. Consequently, the search feature should randomize the search results. This website should aim to balance mentoring time across the volunteers. We don't want another type of fake internet points.

[bheklilr]

Preventing scope creep

Milestones:

1. Get a website working
2. Get the mission statement up, and a list of mentor volunteers with handles
3. Add user management
4. Add the mentor profile pages
5. Add search
6. Add "I was mentored" button
7. Add extra nice-to-haves