Mentoring

Mentoring
Mentoring is an important tool for growing our OpenStack Community. Mentoring helps new Community members come on board, and it helps existing Community members expand their skills and reputation. Mentees help their mentors expand their worldview, challenge their mindset, and brush up on the basics. This process of gaining knowledge and challenging existing ideas is vital to our growth and success.

The OpenStack Foundation sponsors two levels of mentoring:
 * Outreachy Mentoring - an intense internship-type experience over a particular three month period for groups who are underrepresented in Open Source software
 * Upstream Training - a two-day class for beginners in the Community, held on-site the two days prior to the Summit

The Women of OpenStack sponsors additional mentoring initiatives:
 * Cohort Mentoring
 * Speed Mentoring

Cohort Mentoring
Sign up as a mentor or mentee. There is also a mailing list and an IRC channel #openstack-mentoring on OFTC.

This long term mentoring program is a longer term, but more lightweight, program aimed at bringing together cohorts, or groups, of mentors and mentees who may not be co-located. This program offers four mentoring cohorts:
 * 1) Get your first patch merged: Mentors will assist mentees with crafting a change, understanding and adhering to the Developers Guide, submitting to Gerrit, responding to reviews, and ultimately having their change accepted.
 * 2) First CFP submission / Give your first talk: Mentors will assist mentees with submitting a CFP and / or preparing to give a talk.  This could be for OpenStack Summit, OpenStack Days, a local meetup, or another conference or event.
 * 3) Deploy your first Cloud: Mentors will provide assistance to mentees deploying OpenStack for the first time.  This could involve analysis of available deployment tools, configuration, or troubleshooting.
 * 4) Become COA certified / study for COA: Mentors will provide support and guidance to mentees as they prepare for the COA exam.

Please use the tag that corresponds to your cohort when posting questions to the mailing list: [first-patch] [first-cfp] [first-cloud] [coa] '''Current Mentoring Program Members: If you've been matched with a mentor or mentee, please check our our Getting Started Guide for tips on your first meeting. Also check out our guides for mentors and mentees.

Ideally, mentors and mentees work together on goals for the mentoring time period. Work together to get to a point where goals are defined and then met. These goals may look different for each cohort, but the idea is to set attainable goals so that you have graduation criteria. Graduation criteria could be "met a goal of merging one patch" or "met a goal of giving a talk at an OpenStack user group" or "attended a working group meeting and offered input." (Refer to the excellent guides above!) Mentees could expect to graduate to become mentors themselves. When you can clearly communicate goals are met, then the mentoring relationship naturally matures and you can become mentors to more people.

Speed Mentoring
Speed Mentoring is a session held at OpenStack Summits and open to everyone, not just women. This mentoring session is like speed dating: a mentor meets with a group of mentees for a limited amount of time and then moves to another group, cycling through as many mentee groups as possible during the session. This session is typically held over lunch as well to make the environment more relaxed.

Mentor Office Hours for #openstack-mentoring
{| class="wikitable sortable" ! Name ! IRC ! IRC Office Hours ! Timezone ! Mentoring Track
 * Ell Marquez
 * ellopunk
 * Tuesday and Thursday 3pm - 4pm UTC
 * UTC -5
 * Mentorship Program Co-leader
 * Eric Fried
 * efried / fried_rice
 * MTTh 1500-2200 UTC
 * UTC -6
 * First Patch
 * UTC -6
 * First Patch