DC Nashville Mentoring BoF Notes

At DrupalCon Nashville, a small group of us gathered to discuss mentoring in Drupal. Here are the notes from that session (also attached):

DrupalCon Nashville 2018 - Mentoring BoF Notes

Suggested Topics

• Mapping types of mentoring in Drupal community
• Resources for mentoring
• Challenges in mentoring
• Contributor personas
• How to find mentors
• Managing occasional or "drive-by" mentors

Challenges in Mentoring

• Imposter Syndrome
• Path into mentorship is unclear. How can we clarify this?
• Attrition of attention. How can we work assuming that attrition will happen? How can we best support intermitent availability?
• Maybe we need a mentor leader or some form of accountability for ongoing mentee support
• Development of personal relatniships
• Pairing/moving forward beyond sprints
• $$
• Burnout/overlap with day job work
• Lack of project management, tough to find a good ticket
• Tracking mentees over time
• Understanding mentoring history
• Terminology/group names --how do we communicate the message of what we do? (e.g. sprint vs core mentoring, DDI contrib team, etc)

Resources for Mentoring (both existing & desired)

• How to find documentation, we need translatable official documentation
• How to organize a camp or sprint
• Sprint tools
• Slack/DDI contrib team
• d.o as official documentation home
• can d.o contain all mentoring efforts?
• Drupalize.me, BuildAModule, etc.
• Multilingual mentorship
• User guide has limited scope, could we improve documentation around mentorship as part of documentation initiative?
• Money for tools, tickets for mentors
• What can the DA do for us?

How to Find Mentors

• List of willing mentors on d.o?
• #mentoring vs. #support
• Do we mentor beyond code contribution? e.g. camps, working groups, careeers, etc
• Expanding our mentor bios & skills on d.o
• Talk to Megan S. re: expanding mentorship visibility & definition
• Officehours.io for open mentorship office hours
• Let's measure our efforts
• Pairing with new DrupalCon attendees
• Go to First-Time Attendee BoF for matching with new folks
• How can we link people by needs? Some kind of database?

To Do

• Call Megan S. (Kay)
• Work with Documentation initiative to expand mentoring documentation (Mauricio)
• Share notes from this BoF in the issue queue (Tara)
• Increase sponsorship (for banners, postcards, dinner) (Kay)
• Ask DA to add "Mentor" to badges like they have "Speaker", "Sponsor" (Tara)
• How can we get more involved with First-Time Attendee events (e.g. socials, BoFs)?
• Brainstorm ideas for higher visibility at DrupalCon
• Bring info from this discussion to monthly meetings (particularly re: mentorship ecosystem)
• Expand our bios on drupal.org to feature more info re: mentoring (e.g. skills, preferred language, ways to contact for help)