Mentoring

Behind the scenes of running a mentorship program for almost two decades Author: Sumit Srivastava, Sugar Labs

Imagine you have an organisation today in which some people are good at what they do, and some people are new while eager to learn. Now you want to help those new people do great work while passing on little bits of your knowledge.

This is the perfect time for you to run a mentorship program. That is what I will try to explain here.

We are currently running mentorship programs for new contributors via 3 programs: Google Summer of Code Direct Mentorship Program Sugar Summer of Code

The underlying principle of all 3 remains almost the same, constructionism.

What’s that, you ask? It says that people learn most effectively when they are actively involved in creating tangible objects in the real world, be it software, hardware, poems, stories, or anything else!

Structurally, since all 3 are running at the same time we don’t feel much of a difference except some minor reporting differences to the sponsors.

{ Task for Walter and Claudia: What underlying principle? Are we talking about constructionism? Something else? I don’t know. }

In this guide, I will be focusing on the general structure.

There are 3 components to the mentorship program: - Onboarding - Regular meetings - Weekly progress reports from the students

Onboarding starts before the program begins, when people start contributing code.

They join our email list, introduce themselves, try to set up our coding environment, and ask questions when they are stuck.

Some of them contribute a lot with little mentorship.

After a few weeks, the program starts with some of the best contributors we found.

This is when the magic begins.

We try to set expectations on what was proposed to be done, how it could be broken down in chunks, and what would be needed every week to get it done in around 3 months.

Next comes the proposal.

We have a list of ideas that people can choose to propose to work on, and as the proposal deadline approaches, more people select their ideas, either from the list or an original idea.

We mostly focus on two things: quality of the idea and demonstrated ability of the person to implement the idea they proposed, whether from our list or their own.

Of these two things we focus on, we choose a few based on their previous contributions, the quality of their proposal, the usefulness of their idea, their activity in our community, their interactions with other members etc.

Two most important ones are their previous contributions and details of implementation in the proposal.

This is just a thumb rule, deviation is permitted.

Now, the program starts with the selected contributors.

This is when the magic begins.

We talk through two things: details of implementation and how to break it down into small chunks of effort every week.

This happens through meetings. What frequency, you ask?

Meetings for us are high frequency, but different for different mentors. Some meet daily, some bi weekly, some weekly.

The key is regular communication about what is being done, what the problems are, who needs help, where help is needed, and what should be done before the next meeting.

Meetings last between 20 to 60 minutes.

Some are 1 to 1, some are group meetings - varying by what is needed.

At the end of each week is a blog from the contributors about what was done, what is left, what are the goals for next week.

We like blogs being a tech org but it could be anything: a note, a text, etc.

Almost halfway through is a mid term review where we have to review whether the contributor is performing up to expectations and is almost halfway done for the project or task that was promised.

Then the same process is repeated for the second half of the cycle, with frequent meetings, weekly reports, and some daily progress from contributors.

Final review happens at the end of 3 months where we assess whether the contributor was successful in completing the project.

Mostly, if the process was followed and communication maintained, the answer is yes.

Some of these contributors go on to become integral parts of our organisation, mentoring more contributors continuing the chain of progress.

This was a story about looking behind the scenes of our mentorship programs.