[Meta] mentoring mentor meeting June 6 2015 UTC 20:30

Thanks to xjm and others for taking live meeting minutes (in Google doc) - this is a reformatted version.

Attendees

Cathy (YesCT)
Alina (alimac)
Kalpana (kgoel)
Valery (valthebald)
David Hernandez
Jess (xjm)
Lucas Hedding (heddn)
Chris (cilefen)
roderik

Drupalcon LA recap

1)
Results from the Mentor Feedback survey (thanks alina for compiling) were discussed.

2)
Many people doing issue reviews posted short comments in the form of "Tested. Looks good", which are less than helpful in getting issues resolved. The relatively high number of first-time mentors at the LA mentored sprint probably contributed to this. An issue has been opened to mitigate this by a.o. updating mentor documentation.

3)
We continue to have more and more new mentors at DrupalCons, with fewer experienced mentors. Ideas were discussed to improve everyone's experiences at sprints. Summarized:

• We (and/or the DA) need to make sure there are return mentors. Discussion included many comments about whether/how trying to encourage experienced mentors to do multiple Cons per year is feasible. Investing in someone who we know can lead next year would be great, but it's hard to plan people's time in advance.
• Have mentees say who their mentors are so we can:
  • give the novices feedback via the mentor when needed for a better experience
  • mentor the mentors as well
• Adding additional recognition for mentors (documenting/crediting mentor on issue, profile, etc.): is being done now.
• What works well: have new mentors show an experienced mentor the work with the contributors
  • to make it scalable: we need around 4 experienced mentors that are essentially doing the second-tier feedback
  • can come up to front and/or walking around room to mentors asking how things are going
• What worked well in terms of mentoring mentors: reading mentor orientation from a document, taking turns -- this kept people interested; demonstrated that no one person held the knowledge
• What didn't work well: mentors still didn't all attend
  • A mic / more announcements in the mentor room might have helped pull things back together
  • Most mentees -after attending mentor orientation- don't really get started until right before lunch, most work done after lunch. We try to do the live commit at around 3PM which leaves them only around 2 hours to do real work. It's not a big timeframe to get things done.
• More discussion about how/whether to group sprint participants around experienced mentors that will lead each group, and different possibilities to group people (skill level, per issue (category), contribution experience...)

4)
Environment setup

• Speaker notes for the Newbie orientation should be improved
• To do at sprint: intentionally excuse anyone from the Newbie orientation who is not needing to have D8 installed (i.e. documentation only sprinting) so they don't waste time on that.
• vagrant issue: https://www.drupal.org/node/2232049

5)
What to do differently:

• There needs to be a microphone in the mentoring room; need to have more announcements like:
  • attendees, please update your profile
  • add mentors to your profile
• emphasize more that mentors should refer to contributor task documents with mentees
• Idea: short survey with questions to help people sort by skillsets? Or: ask people to move themselves (and be insistent about it)
• reiterate to DA that attendance should be taken 2-3 times (once in the morning during the workshop, one before lunch, once after lunch)
• @alimac has ideas about doing the workshop, will take this up with Brian
• have someone (other than Cathy) who makes sure DA, all mentors do their jobs

Drupalcon Barcelona

See 5) above.

Also, ideas/proposals for talks were discussed.

IRC checkin

Attendance:

• very obvious increase in attendance since LA
• fewer new people coming, more returning people coming
• last Wednesday was very busy -- keeping a spreadsheet at https://goo.gl/gV1X7U
• but also seen: lot of excitement before hour starts and when it does, people are not there
• people demanding mentoring at random times -- joining mentoring channel
  lack of the second slot also makes things worse
• @todo: revisit when another timeslot could be

Issue finding:

• harder and harder to find good starter issues, fewer novice issues (due to the release phase)
• still having the issue where mentees use mentors as issue-finders, mixed
• results getting them to move on to their own work
• some mentors gently giving harder issues works well

Novice issues triage

Finding novice issues is hard. Additionally, many categories of novice issues are out of scope for the beta release -- this point was not discussed extensively.

• https://www.drupal.org/node/2494561#comment-9961039 and updates to novice task handbook page.
• need to check in with patrick who was working on this
• try to do it somewhat during core mentoring

Major issues triage

• The structure of previous triage/sprint(s) worked well
• need to repeat more this summer
  • have major triage IRC meetings
  • reach out to local sprints/camps
    • target an area/component
    • physical (better) or online presense of area/component maintainer helps a lot
  • directly email component maintainers, so that they at least know the contributor task doc exists and they have read it
• get feedback from chris and kgoel
• People who did the triaging wanted to then work on the issue. It was hard for triage leaders to tell people "No, please don't work on things but do more triage".
• not a case for d8 accelerate money

Hi Tamara,

Are you interested in being a mentor or in being mentored?

Follow @drupalmentoring on Twitter. Online mentoring is handled in IRC (see https://www.drupal.org/irc). The IRC channels used for mentoring are #drupal and #drupal-mentoring. The former is for mentoring itself at scheduled times, and the latter is for mentors discussing mentoring.

It will be difficult to participate online without being on IRC. The instructions should get you started. Say hello in #drupal-mentoring and we will find what you need.

Tamara-

I regret that you find this confusing. There are other ways to get involved with the project (https://www.drupal.org/contribute and https://assoc.drupal.org/).

By the way, Drupal core contribution mentoring is on IRC chat, not in Twitter. Twitter is for announcements about mentoring events. There are in-person mentoring events at national and regional events.

thank you, I will try getting on at home then.

It would be great to connect -thank you

Good luck, I hope you land the new job.