Introducing SCS Community Mentorship Program

[itrich]

Community,

we had some very good discussions during the last meeting of the SIG Community regarding the idea of establishing a mentorship program within our community. With this thread, we want to summarize the results of our idea and inform you about the next steps.

Why?

Joining an open source community of an already advanced project can be very hard, especially if we further foster the idea of self-service on-boarding. The high amount of existing repositories and information on our website can be overwhelming at first glance. With an established mentorship program, we want to help newcomers to easily join our teams and lower the barrier for contributing to SCS.

How?

The idea is to establish a community-driven mentorship program, i.e. building and fostering a group of volunteer mentors that help newcomers and interested people. Principally, mentors will mentor people, not organizations. Strategic discussions on how an organization/a company can contribute to SCS is not in the scope of the mentorship program. This will be coordinated by the corresponding product owners or the project team.

What do I need to bring along as a mentor

• Generally, some knowledge and time
• You should have a brief understanding of the mission statement of SCS
• You should know the tools that we use for collaboration and how we organize our work

What should I take care of as mentor?

• Give newcomers an overview of our community infrastructure (Calendar, Matrix, Mailing lists, etc.)
• Present our GitHub SCS Organization and give links to relevant boards, discussions, repositories, etc.
• Present some details from our website (Where can I find xy?)
• Generally, lower the bar to start contributing
• Be present to answer questions regarding collaboration and contribution

What are the next steps?

• We will create a new channel on Matrix for our volunteering mentors in order to allow self-organization and orchestration of the on-boarding process.
• We will create a guideline and resources for our mentors on how to on-board newcomers:
  • Define a standard on-boarding process: What are the relevant tools? Where do I need to sign up? Where can I join the technical meetings? Where can I read more about SCS? ...?
  • Collect frequently asked questions
  • Create a "standard" welcome mail for the mentors ready to be sent out to newcomers
• Create a GitHub app that welcomes first-time contributors

Call to Action

If you should be interesting in becoming a mentor, please send out a short message to Eduard and express your interest in joining our mentorship group. As @fkr already announced, you will not only be able to collect some karma points, but also bonus points (definitely not stored on a blockchain) that you can exchange for extra-time and free drinks with him! ❤️‍🔥
No, all jokes aside, your commitment to this new program will help us to sustainably grow a healthy community that fosters our joint mission: putting users and providers in control. Thank you!