 Thanks for joining me today. I'm here to talk with you about the idea of fluid mentoring, a kind of counterbalance to formal mentoring programs that arise informally between people, which is to say a peer-to-peer relationship in ways where individuals and teams are mentoring each other more horizontally, rather than any kind of top-down structure. Who I am is a principal community architect in Red Hat Soap and Source Program Office. I led the 2.0 edition of the open-source way. I did some of the writing and editing, as well as just getting it produced out. We came out early last year, about a year ago, right, when we did the announcement. In general, I work on do community management and community architecture across things. And currently, I'm the community architect for the Operate First project at operate-first.cloud, which is totally unrelated to what we're talking about today. Let's go ahead and head on. So the self-introduction, that part's all done. After that, I'll quickly establish our definition of mentorship and also this word salad that I'm throwing out there, this peer-to-peer and formal cross-mentoring. I'll demonstrate how that salad is actually an entire meal and talk about how peer-to-peer mentoring works and why it's effective. And then during all of this, with the clock willing, I'll share a few examples of peer-to-peer mentoring for my own experiences and I'll finish with some suggestions of things you can do. And I intend to leave time for questions, so I'll keep moving. So mentorship is an act, experience and opportunity to share what you can, when you can, and how you can. So I couldn't have said it better than this. Whether or not you feel this is accurate to you, this is the definition for the purposes of this talk. And where some of that actually comes from is a couple of locations that particular quote is right on the front. I think it even says it right there of the mentorship.guide, which is a meta-mentoring project that's working on on mentorship in multiple areas, not just in software projects, for example. And some of this other material here is drawn from the Creating Culture of Mentorship chapter that's in the open-source way. And that chapter along with other chapters in the book was a collaboration, but this one was a collaboration between myself and Geddes Cardenas. I met Geddes when we were both presenting about mentoring at an event and attended each other's talks. And Geddes is the maintainer for the mentorship guide. And I believe the source for the quote or actually on the previous slide. And so if you want to get into the meta-mentoring, I'm sure Geddes would welcome your interest in participation. And we have discussed, we've discussed seeing how the mentorship guide and the upstream cross-stream treatment in the open-source way can work. So there's some relationships there where the mentorship guide can really have a lot of meta-bigger concept stuff and then we can drill it down and say, here's how it applies to open-source software. So that's sort of where I've been at. So what is this peer-to-peer and formal cross-mentoring? So it's a recognition of what already exists. There's a power in naming things that exists that just makes it more real for people. And so the major difference here is that there's an intent. It's not, there's an awareness on the part of at least the people involved that they are, that they're doing this. And it's different from being able to say, for example, hold the door open for somebody or just be kind and show somebody a simple thing like how something works. The self-awareness, it really is a key part of it, even if it's only one part of the, well, actually what's interesting is a mentor and a mentee may not even be aware that they're doing this, but outside observers can be seeing it and also the effect and the benefit of peer-to-peer mentoring can be happening. But it's still a little bit more, I think it's more powerful and more useful and more effective when it's made aware of by both people. So for example, when I find myself in either of these positions, I call it out. I say, thank you for the mentoring or thanks for asking for my help on that. And I'm just glad to mention you there and just make sure that people are aware of that informal is happening. And so just as an example of that, from my own experience, early on, when working in the Fedora Project, I mean, there are a lot of people who helped me feel comfortable working in open source communities 20 years ago. And Greg DeKohnersburg in particular was someone who was there kind of leading around the project and doing several things. And so it actually ended up being when he came to me on a back channel and said, hey, it looks like you've been doing a lot of things in the Fedora Docks Project. Maybe you should step forward to be a leader there. The relationship that he'd built with me is this sort of informal mentoring had allowed it to shift to something much more formal where I was going to step forward and take on this mantle of responsibility for the first time. So how does it work? I think it naturally rises when people want to do a thing and one person has even a single piece of knowledge of how to proceed that they can share with the other. And if you think about it, that means within two minutes of walking into a room you can turn from a mentee to a mentor depending on what information you learned in that two minutes. And although there may be an appearance of a one-way flow, the flow is actually both ways. A formal mentoring relationship from like a teacher and a pupil relationship has a built-in expectations of a kind of deference to authority, a deference to the mentor. So peer-to-peer makes it easier to allow this two-way flow to happen. It most often has a back and forth pattern, I think, sometimes within a single session even, sometimes played out over a longer period of time. And it can be focused around skills in one common domain, but it's likely that it'll shift and suddenly and covertly, the mentoring will occur in more social and interpersonal spheres. For example, part of my new project, I've been doing a lot of mentoring around get-offs both learning myself best practices and how to do it and then immediately turning around and teaching everyone else and getting other people up to their first pull request as part of the project. And what I'm finding is that I'm learning a perspective and a way of looking at problems and solutions that I couldn't have otherwise because of these interactions with each of the people as I'm doing this, I'm getting, not just better at doing the teaching and the get-offs and so forth, but we're also building documentation together simply in the process of going back and forth. So a lot of the outcomes from it. Remember to breathe. So there's a natural recognition of peer-to-peer mentoring is strengthened when people use other elements of social capital or capability. So submitting something for someone for a digital badge of appreciation or bringing them a pot beverage of choice of disease, these little subtle things that people are also seeing and cluster that get back and forth between people. So both the mentoring and the appreciation are seen by other members of the community which strengthens the informal and the formal mentorship experiences. So one of the, just as an example of that for my own experience that I was thinking about was, that what was this, 10, 11 years ago, I just finished working on the one dot O version of the open source way and I hadn't done any active community management in a little while and I had the opportunity to work on the first open sourcing of the overt project with Robin Bergeron and she also stepped forward to tell work on that and she co-led the kickoff and the first starting of that community with me. And because we had an existing more of a informal, formal kind of mentoring relationship and gone over, wow, that supported me a lot. So as I was, it provided a lot of confidence for me as I had to step into this role of being a face leader in this kind of space and trying to apply these principles and part of it was that I knew that I could only mess up so much before Robin would notice and would help course correct me and which happened a few times in those first months and help keep things forward. So for me, the best experiences aren't intentionally two-way like that. These can be very poignant when there's a noticeable discrepancy. For example, an experience or age or time of involvement or something like that. But frankly, I learned new things all the time from people with a far, far fewer years of experience either in a project or in a space or even on the planet than me. And by making it clear, I think that we're both mentoring each other. We get to see our own self-worth from the eyes of another and we gain that encouragement to be a mentor for others when we can. So let's go and do a little bit of why it's effective to recognize in this informal mentoring. When part of the culture of a community basically, the people will know that it's not only acceptable but desire to slow down and create a common understanding as a method progresses when it, if you only rely upon a formal mentoring program, for example, then people will, that the point here being that if there's an informal mentoring that gives permission, people always say, you know what, let's slow down, try to get this thing done and figure out what's going on first so that the mission of writing a piece of software or a document is not always the most important thing happening. You know, in fact, often the most important thing happening is the interaction between the people and progressing knowledge in that peer-to-peer mentoring. So then the other was is that there's a permission basically that comes up, a social more of sorts, I guess, that says that everyone has an express permission that we'll ask for in the moment and we'll ask for it off the cuff of mentoring or receive it from anyone else. And that recognition also leads to a shared appreciation which leads to an openly expressed mutual appreciation between the peer, the mentors, people working together and the people around them. And this is a really powerful feedback loop and which is also useful for bringing energy and interest towards formal mentoring programs. People who are not so sure about doing the formal program will discover how beneficial the informal isn't being more likely to to shift to a formal program. And then I see that it empowers people at all levels just to mentor each other and mentor others of all experiences. So no matter who you are and what your experience level is, there's something you can share with others and there is something you can learn from others with a far more experienced or inexperienced than you. So just I think this is one that's really been a point at one in my life in the last couple of years is that I've received a hugely generous amount of mentoring, personal peer-to-peer mentoring on diversity and equity and inclusion for my good friends and colleagues, Jen Madriaga and Nisha Fredericks, both of whom are also DEI professionals. And in fact, Nisha is now the vice president of DEI at the National MS Society. And I believe one of the key reasons they were both willing to spend this energy helping me is because they saw that not only was I doing my work myself, I wasn't just asking for things to be given to me, but I had already proven for our curriculum re-mentoring what I've learned back to others. So in my case, that means that I'm focusing my peer-to-peer mentoring around diversity, equity and inclusion with other cis white men because that's the group where I can mentor and learn from and make a difference most directly. So what might you actually, what might you do? You know, this is the called action slide, the where the steps you wanna go from. I think the one thing is to openly recognize for yourself and for others what you're doing and when it's happening, when you're experiencing peer-to-peer mentoring, just by vocalizing or writing about the experience, it doesn't have to be overbearing, but when it's either using the word mentoring or making it clear to people by the description of things, both those have the effect of building the story, the narrative around it. And the other is you can, well, this is interesting. I'm actually having a pausing moment here because what it is that I was, so the example that came to my mind that this for my own experience was around the idea of inculcating a mindset, which is, I think I'm actually here trying to inculcate a mindset with all of you and my colleague Rupali Tawakar, I got that, was the one who first had this open me to this idea. It wasn't that I'd never heard the words before, but it was that it was time and the space and the way that she had to share this information. And it was just really key for me to provide this kind of humanizing part of the change management experience, that how important it was to focus on this changing, working on the mindset and in a kind way with people. You know, it's not gonna brainwash people, right? We're trying to help bring people to a bigger understanding. So it's kind of hard to explain to here that this kind of nature of a peer to peer mentoring, for me, it's like a way of kind of a boring, something I'd never noticed before, suddenly comes forward as a central idea. And I don't know, that just survived. And that didn't happen because of that relationship with somebody, because of their excitement and interest in it, and because of the way that they've got to tell it. In this case, it was Rupali who opened my mind to this thing that it was already there and helped me kind of frame things in a way that I could see how to move a whole part of a problem forward. And so I think it's part of this is, you know, it's important to reward yourself and others in small ways as you go, using the power of the brain chemicals like the dopamine and oxytocin, just whatever you can to just, that this is part of the noting and the vocalizing is, and the appreciation, the recognition really helps there. And if you like, you can go ahead and join a formal mentoring program and kind of be visible there as well, talk about your experiences. That's another way that when you write about your experience in a formal mentoring program, that is a kind of informal mentoring to other people who are interested in it. And if you like writing and reading or educating about these topics of mentoring, you can participate in one or both of the open source way and the mentorship guide. And we did it. I made it to questions with enough time for questions. So let me stop right there and see, yeah, what questions anybody has. I haven't looked in chat, so you can see that I'm crying too. Cool, so let's see. 10-fold predictive. Yeah, I think that's one of the things I've been, I really noticed is how often people recognize that they're, how much mentoring, receiving a mentoring that they've got once they've made themselves open and aware to this. I mean, it's a lot more obvious in one's mind when someone has been asking you for help and you've given it out, you know, well, that's, you can be aware of that. But that kind of receiving and how it, how it makes a really big difference is there. Oh, thank you, Q and A tap. Thank you, Maureen. Okay, let's go over. Yay. See, that was what you were there for to catch me from locking. So as a mentor, how do you determine when to make a mentorship more formal? That's a good question. It sort of depends, I think, for my experience is, if I'm, if, what's a good way to put this? I think that one thing that can naturally, friendship is the thing that naturally rises between people at different, and it can happen at different levels, right? And the, so one thing that I think that's important that can happen is if you've got, I don't know, this kind of can kind of tell when they're, well, I feel to me like I can kind of tell when I'm working with somebody or talking and they're the level of attention and focus of what they need is something that's a little bit more significant than informal, right? That they really do need to have something that's regularly scheduled, that's regularly filtered, has a regular, you know, deliverables or agenda or something so that there's a thing to come back to that we keep working on over the course of time. And I think that, and the reason why I bring, I'm bringing up the friendship angle too, because it's something that can, it can really easily be missed the opportunity to just kind of separate out a formal mentoring if that's necessary. And it also can kind of make it difficult if you're trying to, if you're trying to give somebody the, if you're trying to be kind to somebody or be a friend to somebody, but then also you need to maybe tell them something in a more direct way as a mentor that might be a way that you wouldn't say it as a friend, right? So that's another kind of situation where by breaking a separation out and saying that, you know, you've got a space where you can have these kinds of conversations, it means that it makes it much more straightforward. Because I think of these like, yeah, I think that's probably the main thing is like when you're, it's either the demands of the, and I don't mean that in a negative way, then, you know, just the amount of energy or that it's gonna take is, it's getting to be more than just, you can handle in a one-off sessions and it seems like you just really have more structure around it or where you sort of need to create some compartmentalization. Those are a couple of things that come in my mind anyway. It'd be interesting to see if anybody else has got thoughts on that. Ah, chat, okay. Wrong poll, there we go. Let's see, so what kind of challenges come up with peer-to-peer mentorship? Yeah, exactly. I think one of the things I think definitely is the friendship angle one where we have to be aware of the ways in which we want to be, we get worried about making our friend upset with us and not wanting to tell them something in a way that we might tell them in a mentoring situation. So I think that that is, that's probably the most common one. And for me as well, I sort of find that if I get, if I get pulled too much and I need to do, and it's time for me to start to do some kind of work towards shifting the relationship, it's also possible that I will just sort of disappear a little bit because of the, just how much capacity I might have at that moment. Do I have the capacity to shift this from informal to formal or to go, or to say, hey, I need to do a little less of this or it's gonna be a couple of months to get back to me. Sometimes that's hardest for me to do at the time when I need to be able to say that the most. So that's definitely a challenge. Cause I don't like leaving people disappointed and I definitely think when people are coming from mentoring, it's often, there's an open and real need in their life at that time for what that is. And it's not that I'm the only person who could feel it or something, but there's a sense of responsibility I have. If I can't do it, I sort of wanna hand that person to somebody else or do something else like that. So I'm just trying to learn to be kind to myself as one is another part of it. And I think this is actually one thing it's beneficial but having recognition of informal mentoring is, I'm just like, you know, I just don't have the capacity this month, but I know, you know, Marie might have, you know, might have some capacity. Oh, and then I looked at it and then she mentions, yes, it's emotional labor for sure. That's exactly the point. So, and I would check on the back channel with another person long before I went and said, hey, maybe this person has some capacity for you. So those are the kind of, those are the kind of pieces to help make sure that it gets around. And that just, and sometimes I think, I think this stuff is really important when you've got people, there are sometimes there are people who just in full of questions and that's the way that they approach the universe, whether it's the way that the brain works or the way their experience with their life works. And I don't, I just don't like to, you know, to shut that down. It's more like, can we tame this just enough so that it can fit within the capacity of this community to answer your questions and to make those things happen. So this is a way of making the, you know, making the community more accessible to people is to do that. So that's, this is a way in which informal mentoring is the way that we kind of share that workload from not just new people, but then also from people who either for short periods of time or longer periods of time just need that much more attention from individuals. Be successful. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's a lot of times for me, what I think it like, if someone's getting really anxious with questions and so we're saying, Hey, I'm going to make sure I'm going to answer your questions, but let's take a step back. Is there something going on that with you that you're feeling anxious or feeling something, you know, just so it's all, sometimes it's just about taming down the context. So then I'm remembering, like myself remembering to slow down and breathe, you know, bringing that kind of action. Let me see what's over the Q and A. Okay. How do we keep more peer to peer mentorship in Fedora? Well, I mean, I think Fedora by its nature just, you know, tends to, I mean, any day go up in source community has that possibility for a lot of peer to peer mentoring. I guess part of the reason why I wanted to bring this here was just that idea that maybe if you're, as part of building this or growing or recognizing really the culture of mentorship in Fedora, all those things is to identify and call these things, call this out, you know, maybe we could have some more badges that are just around it for momentary or just anything that just really helps kind of makes it clear that it's part of things without it being onerous. That's part of it is it should be kind of lightweight, but so maybe that too is a sort of like, what are the three steps? Or, you know, like three steps of how to start. It's like, it's almost like we need a, like a handshake protocol, right? Like what's the, you know, what's the, what's the transmission control of going back and forth with another human in a peer to peer mentorship so that I know it's okay for me to ask for something, I get it and then we, we're done and we shut it down and I move on and it's not just this thing that's kept open. So, you know, a little bit of how to and talking about it might be part of it. So, yeah, I'd be happy to, whatever I can do to help bring those things together, that's would be great. So, yeah, so, and then Dave asked a question about the open source way, which I do some expanding on this in the open source way. The, so the 2.0 version came out last year and there were plans immediately to start adding new content for the 2.1 version. And so, my personal, well, you know, it's the process of getting to the 2.0 that was very much a, we pulled people together and we sort of drove it through to produce it, right? There was not a lot of, there was some energy built to around, around creating as a community with folks, but as is, as is sometimes the case, the experts all got together and sort of didn't take care of making sure that our community was able to keep going. And I, and I took this mantle of all, go do all these things to make it happen. And then I got involved in another project and I've got a personal life that is like this. So, I had to, I recently, I recently I wrote a blog post and a post out on the open source way mailing list. You're just asking for help for a couple of key things. The one is if anybody's interested in helping drive the 2.1 release, which is sort of like an editorial leadership function, getting everybody together, figuring out what we're gonna do and the timeframes and all that kind of thing. I would actually write content for that instead of having to run it. And the other is working on the governance, which is pretty key for the community. So, so without, anyway, that's my pitch, which is for you know, anybody who wants to come up on the project now's a great time. And, and I, and in terms of this content, coming into it actually get it. We were like, this was just sort of, we wanted to do so much. And we wanted to do at least four or five times as much, I think, from the original outline that we looked at in terms of getting things in and ended up just, you know, we kind of pared it down to what we knew we could do within the timeframe. I'd have to go back and see what that outline was to see how much of it is still relevant. But I think there's a lot of room to expand the, go from the broader understanding of how we want to do mentoring in the world, like the mentorship guide covers and bringing more and more of that down and as the open source version of this. The way I think I talk about content like that where we go from one projects to another, it's not, I don't think it was an upstream but more as a cross stream in that the content might, it's going to, would be developed and originate in the mentorship guide, for example. And then we would take that and we kind of not rebrand it but just rework the parts that make sense to rework it in the right way so that it fits in the open source side which just might mean adding examples or things that just make it make more sense. So it's not, that's so difficult. So yeah, actually I would love to answer Marie's question about my favorite aspect of mentorship. The, I think for me it's really just that it's that it's the mutual appreciation that happens and the opportunities to, like it feels good to help somebody and to be recognized for that for sure. But that's all that I'm getting. I mean, I get kind of embarrassed. I just sort of like, if everyone's just always like, oh, thank you for that help. I'm like, there's something for me when I can find in every situation it's not hard to, a way to show the other person that they've been helping me. It just sort of balances things out in my heart, I guess. And so those are my favorite experiences is when it's so absolutely clear that we're both getting things from it. And I think sometimes to me this is one of the great things about mentoring when there's a situation where there's a big disparity of knowledge, for example, that like so my great conversations with talking to people at an event where they're coming, maybe they don't have an understanding of open source like that's very basic and then I'm happy to really give them a big understanding but then they can, I'm just thinking like a case where I was standing I was at the Southern California Linux Expo and I got to have this conversation with a couple of community organizers, people who organized in their neighborhoods in Los Angeles. And one was a young woman, a mother of three kids who was in her late twenties, I think, and the other was an older gent in his seventies I think and he'd been a neighborhood organizer for a very long time. And so, and they were here at my open source way mentoring conversation, and so just that ability to go and see these different experiences and that back and forth between them and then how I was able to kind of add something to that and yet still stand back and gain all of this knowledge about something that was a new topic for something I was new at as well, I was really powerful. So, yeah. Cool, good, I think we are good at the end of our questions and I'm gonna go, I have one more slide that I can pop that says, oh yeah, of course, I'm so sorry, I do need to quickly take a moment to attribute all the images today. I'm including my favorite CC image which is the CC attribution image that is a creatively commons licensed image. And, you know, and then all of these slides and other things are all loaded. I've, the link to the slides is there but it's on the open source way as well which is also available in our GitHub repo, all the other things and parts and pieces there. You can reach me on the interwebs as Quaid and I think that's about it.