[UbuntuWomen] Mentoring program

[Vid Ayer]

On 7/1/06, Elizabeth Krumbach <lyz at princessleia.com> wrote:
>
> > 1] Should we ask people to write to us before we list them as mentors.
> > Coming from DW, I can personally say that the method they follow [1]
> > works very well (at least it did for me :-)).
>
> They should contact us before we list them as mentors.

It does make sense to keep the Mentors page static, and use the wiki
for other tasks.   Should we expect potential mentors to send an
introduction to the list about their  FLOSS activities to the mailing
list or a seperate team of women ?

I think the list is better as its open and transparent process, and
the later followup responsibility can be done by a small (yet diverse)
team of women. I guess that is the procedure in DW, not sure.

If its to the list other women can inform the women team privately
about habitual trollers, flamers, stalkers and others who dont
identify with *-women groups but yet choose to hang out there.   This
is important since we are essentially vouching for their conduct by
recommending them when we list them as UW Mentors and also since a lot
of mentoring is on a one-to-one  basis I would definitely not
recommend men (and women) who don't understand or follow the "be
polite, be helpful" motto. The last I heard, even Gnome was talking
about a code of conduct.

Thoughts .......


> And the old wiki page for mentoring[0] does a decent job of describing what we
> want from mentors.

There is more but I would like more women to speak up on what they
expect from a mentoring program. That will make it easier to
understand and define the direction in the first place.

In my experience, usually when someone agrees to mentor  another person, its :
- usually restricted to a specific task they need done.
- a short/long term association, sometimes time-bound depending on the task.
- just a guidance, which means you will be lifting *the majority* of
the workload.

Before making a commitment, women need to understand the deliverables,
so to speak.



> Oh and we should contact all the people on the current mentoring page to see if
> they're still interested.

I would also suggest that the women (and men) who attended the Paris
summit to introduce the concept of UW to the developers and see how it
goes.



> I'm not sure having courses really falls within the scope of the Ubuntu-Women
> project. But courses are nice and we could try to encourage everyone (not just
> mentors) to get out in the Ubuntu community and write documentation/courses.

Why not on UW,  .... Clytie had mentored me on i18n and so did other
folks on Debian-Women and LinuxChix. DW has many mentors who write
Howto's for tech tasks or use IRC sometimes, which is later summarised
and wikified by other volunteers.  If there are people willing to
share their knowledge then we should be able to use that productively
here.

Courses will be different here, in the sense that it will be for an
Ubuntu specific-task by experts (if I may say so :-)).  For instance,
for packaging in Ubuntu, you would need to how things work in the
system, learn about dependency,  identify the hardware problems, build
a testing environment and identify and solve what went wrong & where.
Most of this is basic for developers but not easy for women starting
out. Its not as simple as reading a tech manual and voila everything
works but maybe someone more experienced can comment on this.

Thoughts ?


> I'm not concerned about privacy in that way, everyone is a newbie at some time.
> But I know some people have that concern and we should not require people to
> use their real names anywhere within Ubuntu-Women.

There was a discussion in some *-women group where folks were
uncomfortable about public archiving and felt strongly about it, with
reason.  Currently we dont insist on anything except love for Ubuntu &
Floss. Heck, we dont even have rigid rules about top-posting and other
policies usually followed elsewhere ;-)

-- 
Vid