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:
 * Long Term Mentoring
 * Speed Mentoring

Long Term Mentoring
If you want to sign up as a mentor or mentee click here.

This long term mentoring program is a longer term, but more lightweight, program aimed at bringing together mentors and mentees who may not be co-located. This program supports two categories of mentoring:
 * 1) Technical: Mentors with experience in a particular area of OpenStack help their mentees grow in that area. This could be a focus area like release management or marketing, or a particular project like Nova or Neutron.
 * 2) Career: Mentors help their mentees define what kind of career they'd like in the community and move toward those goals. Mentors and mentees may or may not have the same focus area in the OpenStack Community.

'''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 technical and career mentoring, 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 both can communicate goals are met, then the mentoring relationship naturally matures and you can continue to support each other and become mentors to more people.

In general, we recommend that each mentoring time period last no more than 6 months, with goals that represent attainable objectives within that time period.''' If you are part of the Mentoring program and would like to opt out, please [mailto:emily.celeskey@gmail.com?subject=Mentoring%20program%20opt%20out email Emily].

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.