Open Stack

Mentoring is an important tool for growing our OpenStack community.  Mentors help new community members come on board and 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 community.

The OpenStack community currently has a few levels of mentoring:

* Outreachy mentoring - an intense internship-type experience over a particular three month period https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Outreachy.
* Upstream University - a two-day class for beginners in the community, held on-site the two days prior to the summit

The Women of OpenStack group has seen the need for additional types of mentoring, specifically long term but lightweight mentoring aimed at bringing together mentors and mentees who may not be co-located.  

* Technical mentoring - mentorship is spread over several months. 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.
* Career mentoring - mentorship is spread out over several months or years. Mentors help their mentees define what kind of career they'd like in the community and move towards those goals.   

Mentors and mentees may or may not have the same focus area in the community. We hope to kick off these new mentoring programs before the Austin summit, to tie in with a new Speed Mentoring session there.

We are currently looking for mentors of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds to take part in the program pilot.  Mentors should have between 1 and 4 hours a month free to spend with their menthe.  

Read our guidelines (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxtM4AiszlEyVkEtdktmWjBPN3c/view) and if you're ready to sign up, please fill out our questionnaire https://openstackfoundation.formstack.com/forms/mentoring!

There is an optional speed mentoring session that will be on April 25th Monday morning at the OpenStack conference in Austin before the first keynote. In this event, mentees will be able to meet a variety of mentors in a short amount of time to see who they would like to pair up with. Please check the appropriate box on the questionnaire form if you’re interested in attending.

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Mike Perez