Mentorship Ideas

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett and I talked last week about mentorship in Dev Edmonton. I'm opening this case to discuss some ideas to make this happen. If this is not the correct place please let me know.

My first thought is that we won't be able to artificially create a true mentorship relationship. We can match people with questions to people with answers but that is not true mentorship. Similar to how you can't artificially create friends but you can create situations where friendship could develop. So my main goal is to setup situations where mentorship relationships could develop.

With that in mind my first idea is "Office Hours" for lack of a better name. We would get 3 to 5 mentors in one place, hopefully with different expertise. Then a mentee can ask them chat with them for 15 minutes. It would be place like Startup Edmonton, a public open space so people feel safe but enough room to spread out and have private conversations.

Thoughts? Improvements? Better idea?

I've also posted on Dev Edmonton Slack about the previous Mentorship spreadsheet asking if the spreadsheet helped anyone. My guess is not but I have been wrong in the past. Not sure if we will continue to have a public mentorship spreadsheet or not.

Thanks.

[MarkBennett]

Thanks for setting this up @mrbiggred! :)

[MarkBennett]

From my perspective, a successful mentorship program would:

1. be easy for mentors and mentees to join
2. recognize the time mentors are volunteering (number of hours, mentees supported, etc.)
3. provide simple and quick matchmaking of mentors and mentees
4. be successful if it resulted in projects and code getting done

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett can you elaborate what you mean by "recognize the time mentors are volunteering". Would you like to see those hours tracked and displayed? Is it for the mentors, mentees? Thanks.

[MarkBennett]

can you elaborate what you mean by "recognize the time mentors are volunteering". Would you like to see those hours tracked and displayed? Is it for the mentors, mentees? Thanks.

Something like that yes. If we track hours a mentor has donated, PRs reviewed, or number of people mentored, or length of time they've served as a mentor then we should probably have a way to recognize that somewhere. This could come later though as long as it was something we were thinking about.

[mrbiggred]

Found this post about setting up Mentor Everywhere. A list of documents they used can be found here. Yes it's public and linked from the blog post.

Don't think our mentorship program should be as formal but there are some ideas we can borrow.

[MarkBennett]

Thanks @mrbiggred. I'll check those out. Is there anything specific you think we should adopt?

[mrbiggred]

I think we should borrow some questions from the Mentoring Goals questionnaire. Also make sure we don't overwork mentors.

My goal for this week, assuming my cold is gone, is to contact a couple mentors on the list and see if they are interested in helping us for our first test. What that first test is I'm not sure yet.

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett is this the Christian you where talking earlier? I see he has office hours:

https://christiannaths.com/#open-mentorship

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett after our discussion at Develop Ed I think we should try an open office hours as our first experiment. It would be like a call-in show where we have the mentor, a host, and the mentee (callers).

The host would be responsible for making sure only one question is asked at a time and possibly filtering the incoming questions. If there are no questions then the host could ask the mentor some pre-planned questions to keep the conversation going.

This could be done remotely (e.g. Zoom) or in person at Startup Edmonton. If we expect coding questions then we will make sure the mentor has an IDE that others can view remotely or projected on a screen.

For the first time I would limit the time to no more than 30 minutes.

If you like the above we can try to set something up for late September or Early October. We can ping some mentors that I've been reaching out too over the past couple months and see if they are interested.

If the does not work we can try other ideas. Thoughts?

[MarkBennett]

This could be done remotely (e.g. Zoom) or in person at Startup Edmonton. If we expect coding questions then we will make sure the mentor has an IDE that others can view remotely or projected on a screen.

Great idea @mrbiggred! Why don't we set something up with low initial effort to gauge interest and get feedback on format. I'd suggest we use Xoom and bring in people to share their screens, or else we can setup OBS with Skype and NDI if we want to offer a little more control over the video. Here's a link describing the setup.

https://youtu.be/7YnWffwxLSU?t=121

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett I'm assuming that Xoom your mean Zoom. Zoom would be my first choice just because I'm familiar with it.

Why don't we do a test with Zoom next Friday (Sep 13th) around lunch time. We can setup a meeting and get a couple Dev Edmonton members to connect and figure out how to let people ask questions one at a time. Does that work for you?

[MarkBennett]

Sure. That sounds like a great plan @mrbiggred. Do you want to post something in the #dev-talk channel?

[mrbiggred]

@MarkBennett I've posted to Dev Edmonton Slack looking for people to be test mentees this Friday. My plan is to setup a Zoom stream, setup me as a host and you as the mentor (if you are free this Friday, if not then someone else), then see if I can figure out how to let mentees ask questions. I wonder if Zoom has some sort of question queue?

I've used Zoom before but only for smaller meetings where everyone can talk. I'll have to RTFM about it's hosting options. I also know Zoom can record meetings but I've never used that feature.

If need be we can meet in person or via Zoom to discuss further before Friday.