Newcomers need you, how to be a good mentor

OpenStack Summit Austin 2016

Transcript

1. Newcomers need you, how to be a good mentor Mahati Chamarthy - Intel Corporation Rossella Sblendido - SUSE Victoria Martinez de la Cruz - Red Hat Inc.
2. Why mentoring is important in FOSS 1 Community and contribution processes analysis
3. Open-source is made of people ◉ # hired contributors > # independent contributors ◉ Hired contributors: design/implementation of new features, fixing high/critical priority bugs ◉ Independent contributors: bug reporting, fixing low/medium priority bugs, bug triaging, wiki updates
4. Onboarding process ◉ OpenStack onboarding is hard ◉ This impacts negatively on some type of contributors ◦ Contributors with no experience in open-source ◦ Contributors with time-constraints
5. Life continues after onboarding ◉ Code reviews ◉ Team meetings
6. Mentoring helps the community ◉ More diversity ◉ More ideas ◉ Bigger and more qualified community
7. Mentoring helps individuals ◉ Growth & Exposure ◉ Learning ◉ Impact on an individual's professional life
8. “ "Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by other people's experience." - Otto von Bismarck
9. Where you should look for mentees 2 Internship programs and newcomers onboarding
10. Internship programs ◉ Outreachy ◦ Underrepresented groups ◦ 3 months, 2 rounds per year ◦ Sponsored by several organizations/companies ◉ Google Summer of Code ◦ Students ◦ 3 months, 1 round per year ◦ Sponsored by Google
11. Mentoring in Summits ◉ Upstream training ◦ Experienced engineers interested in sharing their first steps on the community ◦ Every Summit! ◦ Legos ;)
12. Lightweight mentoring ◉ Women of OpenStack Speed Mentoring ◦ Pair mentors and mentees to work after the summit ends ◦ People who are already involved with the community
13. General mentoring ◉ openstack, openstack-dev and openstack- internships mailing lists ◉ #openstack-101 on IRC ◉ New folks often picking irrelevant bugs that are usually invalid? - Good news! they want to help us!
14. I spotted a newcomer, what should I do? ◉ Never assume anything ◉ Ask about their technical interests ◉ Ask about their environment (if any) ◉ Point them towards the right docs/people ◉ Let them know they can ping you if they need something else
15. Are you ready to start mentoring ? 3 Hands on for mentoring
16. The question is the answer sometimes... If you are here, probably yes!!!!
17. Knowledge requirements ◉ You should be familiar with the tools used by the community (Git, Gerrit, CI) ◉ You should be able to assign a project to your mentee that spans few months
18. Mentoring is not babysitting ◉ Few hours/week to mentor
19. Commitment ◉ If you plan to change job or the OpenStack project you contribute to, it’s probably not a good time to commit to mentor!
20. Mentoring tips and tricks 4 How to guarantee a good mentoring experience
21. Time management and delegation ◉ Establish some ground rules: ◦ Let them know when you are available ◦ Teach them on how main communication channels work (IRC/ML) ◉ Schedule one on one meetings ◉ Introduce your mentee to other people in the community
22. Get to know your mentee ◉ Try to understand the experience level of your mentee to assign a doable task (not too easy, not too hard) ◉ Try to encourage your mentee to find answers on her/his own before asking ◉ If your mentee is too silent, establish a time to talk and get feedback
23. Have fun! ◉ What’s the point of mentoring if you don’t have fun? ◉ Celebrate your mentee’s success ◉ Smile when something goes wrong and point the mentee kindly toward the good direction
24. Mentors don’t know everything ◉ Don’t feel bad if you don’t have answers to all the questions, nobody does! Find them together with your mentee!
25. References ◉ Upstream Training - http://docs.openstack. org/upstream-training/ ◉ Guidelines for lightweight mentoring - https: //drive.google. com/file/d/0BxtM4AiszlEyVkEtdktmWjBPN3c/ view
26. “ Thanks!! Any questions? @MahatiChamarthy @vkmc @rossella-s