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Mentoring

Revision as of 03:10, 16 August 2017 by Diablo rojo (talk | contribs) (Lightweight mentoring)

Mentoring - Sponsored by Women of OpenStack

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 and challenge their mindset. This process of gaining knowledge and challenging existing ideas is vital to our OpenStack Community.

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: Lightweight Mentoring and Speed Mentoring.

Lightweight mentoring

This Mentoring program is a several-months-long, but lightweight, program aimed at bringing together mentors and mentees who may not be co-located. We suggest that mentees already be part of the OpenStack Community and have gone through, or be familiar with, the Upstream Institute training materials. 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 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.

We hope to have another mentoring session for Sydney but are still in need of a sponsor.

Mentor Signups

Are you interested in a being a mentor? We are always looking for mentors of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds. 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!