Mentoring Systems Within the Community

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Walter Lapchynski <wxl at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> From: "Elizabeth K. Joseph" <lyz at ubuntu.com>
>> Mentoring needs to go both ways, every one of my mentees
>> has helped me in some way and many continue to today even though
>> they've moved on from the relationship in the mentor-mentee capacity.
>> The successful mentoring relationships that came out of BT that elfy
>> have noted had this quality.
>
> Could you guys offer some examples?

Looking at Ubuntu specifically, benefits to mentors include:

 - Shifting/reducing workload of mentor once mentee is up to speed.
 - Helping the mentor become more familiar with subject matter by
teaching it, and having a mentee who learns related things and shares
them with the mentor - everyone learns!
 - Mentees can offer fresh perspectives in the safe space of the
mentor-mentee relationship, when combined the mentor's influence in
the project and experience can help improve on and innovate in the
project more quickly than either could do alone.
 - Networking. This is huge, some mentees go on to do amazing things
and many of us have built our hobbies and/or careers around open
source and the communities therein. We all want to succeed and do well
in what we spend our time with, and luck and opportunities rarely make
themselves. Personal connections help tremendously and the
mentor-mentee bond is a strong one.

These reasons are similar to why mentoring is so important in
professional careers.

Of course not all relationships yield this, and it does feel nice to
help someone for a while even if it ultimately doesn't work out, but
it's the potential and value of successful mentorships that keep many
of us at it :)

> Another question related to this: does it NEED to benefit you? Is the
> building up of people not benefit enough? I mean this is what support
> folks do all the time.

As much as I wish that it was all driven by altruism in the long term,
I have to look at the results in programs I've participated in. The
burnout rate of mentors who don't get anything out of a relationship
is high, some refuse to mentor anyone ever again after a bad pairing
or two. So I believe yes, there does need to benefit the mentor in
some form that is valuable to them.

Support folks burn out too, but they're solving a variety of problems
for lots of people, not one-on-one all the time with a single user
(unless they're being paid to, but I'm talking about volunteers here).
More importantly, they can also turn it off at any time without
consequence if they need to take a few weeks (or months, years) off.
When you have a needy mentee you can't do this. Even with a good, self
sufficient, mentee you need to make arrangements if you need a break.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2