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Mentoring

Revision as of 22:05, 10 February 2016 by Ekhugen (talk | contribs)

Mentoring - Sponsored by Women of OpenStack

Mentoring is an important tool for growing our OpenStack community. Mentors help new community members come on board and existing community members expand their skills and reputation. Mentees help their mentors expand their worldview and challenge their mindset. This process of gaining knowledge and challenging existing ideas is vital to our community.

The OpenStack community currently has a few levels of mentoring:

  • Outreachy mentoring - an intense internship-type experience over a particular three month period
  • 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 group is sponsoring two other types of mentoring, specifically long term but lightweight mentoring aimed at bringing together mentors and mentees who may not be co-located.

  1. Technical mentoring - mentorship is spread over several months. 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 mentoring - mentorship is spread out over several months or years. 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 community.

We hope to kick off these new mentoring programs before the Austin summit, to tie in with a new Speed Mentoring session there. We are currently looking for mentors of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds to take part in the program pilot. Mentors should have between 1 and 4 hours a month free to spend with their mentee. Read our guidelines and if you're ready to sign up, please fill out our questionnaire!