 I wanted to introduce Jen Greenway who's going to be talking today about mentoring and open source. Jen works on our diversity committee at scale and her day job is a teacher. So please give me a warm welcome and wish for Jen. Thank you Hannah. Can you guys hear me okay? I can hear myself loud and clear so I think we're good. Thank you for coming. People in the back feel free to move closer to the front unless you're a back sitter. I have to sit in the back myself so no pressure I don't mean to single you out. We're here to put a dent in the universe. I wondered if it was a good idea to start a presentation at an open source conference with a Steve Jobs quote. I felt like it could go either way but I thought maybe if the quote's good enough and I think this one is and it's very relevant to what I'm talking about. This is what Steve Jobs said. Hopefully everyone in this room can agree that helping other people is a good thing. If you don't agree with that you probably shouldn't be in this particular trap and there's still time for you to get to another talk. One of the ways I have found in my life to be helped and help others is through mentoring. So I'm excited to talk about the subject with you guys. I presume if you're here today you either have a little bit of interest in the subject as well or you're related to me in some way or being paid by me. I'm going to start off by sharing a story about mentoring that's also about teaching because I make my living as a teacher and that's where I come from. So this past semester through the mentoring program that I work with I had the opportunity to mentor a woman who had previously worked in the classroom of a friend of mine and she came to me to be mentored and shared a story from that classroom that I thought was relevant to mentoring. So during that time in the classroom she had observed a student who had very significant challenges, social, emotional challenges, behavioral challenges. It was his first time meeting his parents and going to preschool. He was a second language learner. He was four years old but developmentally he was about two. So he just had a lot going on. So due to his behaviors a series of meetings was held. Meetings with his parents, meetings with the administration, teachers, basically everyone. And the big question was how can we keep this boy in our program. At age four he was already at risk of being kicked out. So the woman that I mentored recalled speaking to the teacher about this. She was there in the classroom doing observations and saw what was going on and she spoke to the teacher and said what do you think is going to happen and what are you going to do? Are you advocating for him to be removed? And the teacher said, no, absolutely not. And the woman was surprised by that answer because she saw firsthand how this child was in the classroom. And so she asked the teacher, why would you not want him to be removed? It would make your day so much easier. And the teacher said, what if I'm all that he has? What if I'm the only consistency that he has? What if this is his only safe place in the world? She likely was the only consistency he had. And spoiler alert, she made a big difference for him and he graduated and went to kindergarten. But here's where this teacher, my friend, really dented the universe. The woman who was in her classroom doing those observations came to my classroom and she shared that story with me. And I saw it reflected in all of her interactions with the children in my program. Now I've shared that story with you and I'm sure that it's making you think about people that you've impacted in your life and things that you've observed. She went on to get hired by our school district and now she has her own classroom so she's sharing out all those things that she learned. So raise your hand if you've ever thought about being a mentor. Humor me for a second. I have a group activity. Take a moment to think about something that you know a lot about. Something that you're not necessarily an expert in but something that you really care about. That you love doing, that you can't stop talking about. Do you have it in your head? Maybe. If you're sitting next to someone else, turn to that person and tell them what you're thinking about. Excellent. If you were able to think of something that you know a lot about, love, care about, or something that you can't stop talking about, something that maybe you're really curious about, you could wear one of two hats by the time you leave today. Being a mentor or being mentored by someone else. So these are a few of the hats that I wear to make my dent in the universe. In my day job, I'm an early care teacher for the Kanao Valley Unified School District here in Southern California. I work with infants and toddlers age six weeks to two years. I'm excited that we have a very young child in the audience because I feel much more at home. I'm a scale volunteer. As Hannah mentioned, this year I became part of the Scale Diversity Committee, which I'm really excited to be a part of. It's the best committee at scale. I'm an avid reader, so that's my default when I want to learn more about something as I get actual books and find out what's going on with it. I'm a student all the time learning new things. I'm just looking at beginning a master's program in human development, which is both really exciting and incredibly daunting, depending on the day. And I'm a mentor. So I'm going to talk to you about my experiences being mentored and being a mentor. When I look at the open-source community, I see a lot of groundwork that's been made for successful mentoring. But I also see a lot of holes and a lot of chances that are maybe being missed by misunderstandings. So I'm just going to share some ideas with you today that you can take with you, do with them what you wish. This is a photo of me as a college student working in the classroom of my mentor teacher who obviously was instrumental in my life and development. My time in the classroom with her helped me to learn how to be a teacher in the real world. So things that I learned from my mentor weren't things that I learned in the classroom as a student learning about teaching. For my mentor teacher, I learned it's really important to have a plan and a backup plan and be ready to get rid of that plan any second. I also learned to not listen to the little voice in my head that was always like, maybe this isn't the right job for me, maybe I'm not in the right field. She gave me confidence in myself. So like a lot of people who have been purposefully mentored, I wanted to mentor others. So now I'm a member of the Mentor Teacher Program in the state of California, which is a fairly structured program, which is one of the things I'm going to talk to you about today. I mentor a college and university students who are training to be early educators in the future. My role is to guide them towards increased competence and confidence in the classroom, and my relationship with each one of them is unique and different depending on where they're at and their development and what they need from me. Among the people that I have mentored have been a future pediatrician and occupational therapist, an elementary school teacher, a special education teacher, and even an exotic dancer who wanted to become an educator. Some of the things I taught them were specific skills that were relevant to our jobs, but most of them needed something more general, less quantifiable. This less quantifiable something is what mentoring is really all about. Mentoring is entirely relationship-based. So just like open source is all community-based, which kind of makes it sound like open source might be relationship-based as well, although this can be difficult for some people to embrace. This makes the open source community ideal for building mentoring programs and partnerships because it's just about constant growth and improvement, tweaking things until they work just right, making things better. It's all about transparency and honesty. So in my mind, when I think about these things, I think the correlation between mentoring and open source is very clear. And hopefully by the time you leave here today you will feel the same way. Mentoring is how open source will succeed. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring looks like. We'll start by talking about what mentoring is not. A mentor is not a coach, although they may coach you sometimes. A mentor is not a role model, although they could be looked at as a role model to others. A mentor is not your boss. Although they may have been a mentor to you in the past or they could be in the future, a mentor is not necessarily an expert. A mentor is not a sponsor. And a mentor is not your best friend. Although your friendship may involve as your relationship goes on. People often confuse the concepts of mentoring and coaching. And trying to untangle the differences between the two things sounds like semantics until you really think about it. So coaching is performance driven. Mentoring is development driven. Coaching is very task oriented, very specific, while mentoring is relationship oriented. And people can have or develop relationships with a coach. And people confuse the two things and overlap the two things all the time. And it's probably not a huge deal. But the point is your mentor could coach you, but they won't always coach you. Mentoring is not about tasks. A coach would make you better at really specific things. But a mentor supports you at being better in general. This is me with a mentor and a role model. So my role model is the woman on the right here. She wrote a lot of textbooks that I read in school. She was an idol to me. I've admired her for years. I studied her, memorized her theories, taught her theories to other people. She was totally on a pedestal to me. And I had the opportunity to meet her this year at a conference that we were both speaking at. And we talked really briefly about her work. And I tried not to be too much of a geek and shower her with my adoration. And then we talked really extensively about our cats, which I thought was a pretty good balance. So I left our encounter thinking more of her as an actual human being in person, but she's still definitely a role model to me because she's up on a pedestal. My mentor, who's pictured on the left, is someone that I interact with at least once a month. She's in charge of the mentor program that I work with, as well as being a professor in my field. And she's a real person with real strengths and flaws that I know and a phone number that's programmed into my phone. A mentor is a person who's always reachable to you, not just a person that you observe from a distance. So it's possible that you have a warm and wonderful boss who feels like a mentor. I've had those bosses before, and they can be very beneficial to your development within a specific organization and as a person, but it's really important if you're serious about being mentored that your mentor is not currently your direct supervisor or manager, because that's not what's best for you or for the organization that you work for. Conflicts can develop there really easily. It makes the relationships just a bit stickier in general. A mentor does not need to be an expert in their field, but they need to be more of an expert than you are. To be effective, they need to have been where you are now, at least roughly. They need to have experience that's relevant to your goals. And their experience should be relatively recent so that it's applicable to what's happening right now in the community or organization. Most of all, they need to be willing to honestly and openly share with you about those experiences, the mistakes that they made, the successes they had, what they would do differently. If you keep up with what's hot in women business circles, which I'm sure that all of you do, you've probably heard about the subject of sponsorship, which is a pretty hot subject right now. There was even a study done on the subject by a woman named Sylvia Hewlett. She's the president and CEO of the think tank center for talent innovation. And a book was written about her study that's called Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Has anybody heard about that? One person? So when it comes to sponsors like with coaches, it can be difficult to untangle the web of which is which and does it even matter? It matters to me because I think that mentoring is really important and that sponsorship is different and I think that mentoring has a real value. Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and author of Lean In, has famously said that being asked to be a mentor is a total mood killer. She says that of women, if you stop telling them, get a mentor and you will excel. Instead we need to tell them, excel and you will get a mentor. And I think that's a fantastic sound bite. But I can't see how it's useful advice for people who feel like they need or want a mentor. The way that Hewlett, who conducted that study on sponsorship, talks about sponsorship, reminds me of that quote from Sandberg. And she says, a relationship has much more stake for both parties. It's an investment that must be earned and that's where she kind of lost me on sponsorship because that's where you turn back to mentoring. Relationships that really matter don't have to be earned. You're worthy of it right now as you are with all your nerves and insecurities and everything that you have yet to learn. So that being said, sponsors could be fabulous for you and your career. I think of sponsors as a person who kind of markets your brand. They can talk about you. They may not talk extensively with you, but they could be important. Finally, your mentor is not your best friend. I'm sure your best friend is a wonderful person and there are many wonderful things to you, but when it comes to mentoring you need to have someone in your life who might be a bit more objective about you. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring actually is. Mentoring is generally a formalized partnership, but there is also informal mentoring relationships that form. So for purposes of this talk, what I mean by formal is that it's an agreement between two parties with specific expectations. And sometimes informal mentoring shifts just happen between two people and they may not even realize that oftentimes I'll talk to people and ask them about mentors that they've had for a minute and they say, you know I had this person years ago who helped me so much with this one thing and they were really kind of a mentor to me and they didn't necessarily have a formalized partnership, but that can be a benefit. Mentoring is centered on guidance. A mentor is defined as a guide and a guide who will help you towards the goal that you have decided on. Mentoring is generally long term, relatively long term, meaning that it will last for longer than a few weeks. Sometimes it could last for years. Mentoring is supportive and it's mutually beneficial. Mentors get as much from the partnership if not more than their protégés. There's been extensive studies done on how mentoring is a value to corporations because when people perform as mentors they're more invested in the work that they're doing. And I can speak to that from my own experience when I joined the Mentor Teacher Program it really made me step up my game and think about everything that I was doing and kind of reaffirmed that I love my job and I want to help other people be able to enjoy the same thing. It's also important to note I think that mentoring is not gender specific. So men can mentor a woman and women can mentor a man. Younger people can mentor older people and vice versa. It's just about finding the right match for you. This is Rita Pearson who was an educator who gave a fantastic TED talk and she was a really outspoken advocate for education and she said this which I believe can be applied to mentoring. I would change it to every person deserves a champion someone who won't give up on them who understands the power of connection and insists they become the best they can possibly be. A mentor is the person who believes that you can reach the next level and knows how they can guide you there and they believe in the power of connection because they understand that relationships are the foundation of success. The first meeting that I ever had with my mentor the one that was pictured a few minutes ago she kind of laid out what my life could be for the next five to ten years and she was so confident about it that I was completely convinced that I could do everything that she thought I could do and I have done many of the things that she said that I could do which I wouldn't have thought of doing if I hadn't had that conversation with her. So even though the conversation made me want to go home and immediately go to bed it was a really good thing. This is where I'm going to put on my child development hat for a little bit and talk about a theory that was developed by Lev Vygotsky. So in child development and education circles we often talk about his theory as scaffolding which is what mentoring is all about. You can see in these little circles over here in the purple section it says current understanding can work unassisted. In the teal section it says the zone of proximal development that's where you learn through scaffolding and the green area is what is out of reach to you right now. So the zone of proximal development that teal area there has been defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. Vygotsky viewed interactions with peers as an effective way of developing skills and strategies. What children can do with the assistance of others may in some sense be even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone. This seems very relevant to what we're doing with mentors. Our work with our mentors is indicative of our mental development. We need other people to reach our full potential. When I describe ZPD to early childhood people I use the example of doing a puzzle. And so I say imagine a child is working on a puzzle and they can't quite get the piece to fit. They know where it's supposed to go but maybe they don't know that they need to turn it a little bit and keep trying. So say you're sitting there with them as they're doing the puzzle and you say oh if you turned it a little bit it might fit and then they're able to be successful and they've learned how to do it and maybe next time they'll try to do it too. So I haven't done that much coding in my life but I've done a little bit and for me it seems that that very easily applies to working on code. Years ago there was a Seidenfeld episode that included a bit about mentoring. Has anybody seen it? So the character of George had a protege and George also had a topic, risk management that he needed to learn about for his job. So when his protege said that she was not familiar with the topic he handed her this giant textbook he said you read about it and then teach it to me. To be clear this was just George being lazy. Mentoring is not exactly about being lazy but every mentor has their own style. So it's important that their style match yours in some way. Some people learn very well in this way. Some people would need a more hands-on mentor but ideally you would have some combination of both. A combination of trying and failing and flying. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on as a mentor was doing too much of the work that was needed by my protege. I had one student who really took advantage of me knowing that I would be willing to do the work rather than see her fail. So with that particular student I could have really helped her with time management and responsibility but I was not a very good mentor to her because I basically took over where she left off and we were not a good match. So that's just to highlight the point that each mentoring relationship is unique and it's a learning process on both sides. So some people have the idea that because they learn things the hard way and on their own say they first joined a community and they got flamed and then they learned that's probably not the best way to start an email. It was good enough for them so that's the best way to learn things. It'll be good enough for you too. It's a strong survive and open source. Survival of the fittest. And they think that this is how we can create the best code and build the best communities because if you can't handle it you should just leave. When I was putting together some pieces for this presentation I came across a blog post that was written by a developer in the open source community. Can the post address the topic of whether or not he would mentor someone because apparently people ask him all the time and Chris it wasn't you. So he wrote this blog post where he gave the short answer no and also the long answer which was all about how he had had to learn things for himself. He had to get involved on his own. He had to read the documentation himself make all those mistakes so everyone else should have to do that too. And I believe he also walked uphill in the snow both ways to and from school without shoes. So this attitude goes against what mentoring is all about because mentoring is the idea that your experience is both positive and negative can be shared and passed on so that our collective wisdom grows and we can become better as we go. Communities become better and stronger this way rather than increasingly divisive. Even when someone is being mentored they're going to go through hard things and they're going to have to learn things for themselves. It's also worth noting that everyone learns in different ways and what one person found to be motivating another person may find to be completely discouraging. And that's not to say that proteges should be coddled. Mentoring is about guiding or scaffolding not about explicitly teaching specific skills and it's about relationships that benefit all parties. Open-source communities have a long history of valuing self-reliance because do-it-yourself is the Linux way. But let's all note that truly effective mentoring is a way of fostering self-reliance. So my advice to open-source mentors is to warn your protégé if they're about to do something that's going to get them flamed because that's not an effective way to learn. But maybe let them see for themselves that there's a bug in their code because that is an effective way to learn. This is from the Fedora IRC Helpers Code of Conduct. The Fedora IRC channel has assigned helpers who work specific shifts to welcome newbies to their community. One of the things they tell them is to practice the same method used by a surgeon. Do no harm and advise the user on a course of action that makes minimal changes to effective fix. This is a great example of the kind of groundwork that's being made for mentoring in open-source. It sets the right tone. Less of the read-the-manual tone and more of the hey, we're glad you're here tone. Google Summer of Code may be one of the best-known examples of mentoring in open-source. This is a link to their manual which is so comprehensive and beneficial that everyone should just read it for themselves. As fantastic as their overall program is, the documentation of their program may be even more admirable just based on how specific and extensive it is. It's an awesome comprehensive resource for anyone who's wanting to be a mentor or develop a mentoring program. If you don't know about Google Summer of Code, it's a global program that's open to college and university students where they're paired with a mentor, a coding mentor from a participating open-source project, and they're paid a stipend to write code for that project. From their website, I found that since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 8,500 successful student participants from 101 countries and over 8,300 mentors from over 109 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code. Both mentors and protégés enter the relationship with expectations. It can be a really good thing to have the expectations agreed upon and even signed on or at least reviewed by both parties together. If you're going to be a mentor, you need to take a moment to think about these things and whether or not you can give them to your protégé. These are some examples that I came up with. Things like full and undivided attention during meeting times, which can be surprisingly difficult to accomplish. You may need to close your laptop and set aside your phone. An openness and willingness to try new things, to give and receive feedback, and to actively work together on agreed upon goals. To do what you say you will do. To ask questions and gather information. To be patient. To allow for the opportunity to make choices. So like I said, these are just examples and you could expand upon them if you decided to have a contract. So I mentioned earlier that there's formal and informal mentoring and then there's the kind that kind of falls somewhere in the middle. But a lot of times formal mentoring will come when someone who's volunteered to mentor is assigned a protégé. So you might join a program and they say here's a person who needs a mentor. There you go. And usually in those cases the two parties have already agreed to certain guidelines or rules as part of the project. And that might be enough. But you might want to think about some of these things moving forward. Just simple things like when and where were you going to meet, for how long, scheduling the meetings, what is the aim of your partnership and what's the best way to contact one another. If you're the kind of person who doesn't like to get calls after a certain time that would be a good thing to share with each other going in. Goals and objectives. So let's apply this to open source. One of the common examples of mentoring in open source is when a new person joins a project and they want to commit some code. They actually assign a mentor to a newbie. And the mentor will work with them on their code before it gets submitted. And this is a benefit to both sides. It's an opportunity to learn about communication as much as it is an opportunity to learn about code. Ideally it gives the person being mentored the opportunity to understand how that unique community works and how they can best fit in there. So let's say the goal in this case would be submitting a piece of code or fixing a bug or adding a feature. The objectives to that goal might look like figuring out exactly what part of the code you're going to work on, and the mentor may break that down even further for you. You might agree to have certain pieces done by a certain date to submit to your mentor who will then check them for bugs and report back to you. And after that the objectives would be to further debug it, test it again, and finally submit it following the steps to find a mentor. I have some advice for you. Sometimes mentors will come to you out of the blue, but more often if you're intentional about it you need to actually seek them out yourself. So remember that a mentor is a person who's further along than you on the same journey. Think about your expectations and what you want a mentor to be to you. Before you go looking for them you should know exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you know what project you want to work on, what you want to work for, or what job in general you would like to have. Who are those people who are already there? You want to network with some of those people. So conferences like this are a great opportunity for that. Some of you may be here for that very reason. And in that case you have to be willing to go up and actually talk to people. You can ask someone else to introduce you which might make that conversation a little bit easier. The in-person aspect can be really helpful and that's a wonderful way to network. But something to watch out for in those cases is the post-conference leg. So you go up to someone and you take the risk and talk to them and you have a wonderful conversation and you feel really engaged with them and then you both go home and you kind of forget about it. So it can be really helpful if you meet someone at a conference with the goal of networking with that person that when you take their business card you commit to a follow-up. Or it's just to yourself. Make a little note like on Tuesday I'm going to follow up with this person at noon. If you don't have the opportunity to attend a conference like this or you don't find a mentor at a conference like this there's a lot of other ways that you can go about it. You can look at working at school through friends online business associations nonprofit organizations maybe even within your family someone knows someone who has a shared interest community groups business chambers of commerce and Lugs can be a great resource and I'm going to talk more specifically about them in a minute. So how do you ask someone to be your mentor? It can be kind of an awkward conversation. So you want to engage with them a little bit first so you can get to know each other a little bit better. You want to be sure that it's the right fit so you want to learn some things about them before you commit to having them be your mentor. So you're going to want to be really specific. You don't want to think things like I need to advance my career you need to think specifically like I would like to know more about public speaking or I need help in conquering imposter syndrome or I want to be able to confidently join this project because I want to develop this new feature. Why are you asking this specific person to be your mentor? It really doesn't hurt to give them an example of how they have already helped or influenced you and what prompted you to choose them in the first place. You have an equal responsibility as a protégé in the mentoring relationship and maybe you've heard about the benefits of mentoring and you think yes I want to mentor but there's a lot more to it than that. In order to reap the benefits of the partnership to be that person who's five times more likely to be promoted you need to be a person who's open and engaged in the process. You need to do the work. I have some tips from Diane Schumacher Craig who's the global head of research economics and strategy at Wells Fargo. These are some of the things that she says help you to be someone who's great to mentor. So be great at what you do. At least be excited about what you do. Ask for more responsibility. Don't be a wallflower. Build your support network and most of all help to promote the success of others because you're joining a network of people. Sometimes the person that you ask to mentor you is going to say no. Short answer, no. If that happens it's probably not about you and it's going to be okay because there's a lot of other people out there who are going to say yes. So you could ask them if they know anyone else who might be willing to take on that role or you can move on yourself to the next candidate. If you don't have another candidate you can revisit the list of places where you could find one. Here's the list of ideas where you might encounter your next mentor. So Linux user groups can be a good place to find a mentor. And I say this with some caveat because the climate of the user group is going to be dependent upon that particular population. Here's how I found out about Linux user groups. I met my husband in 1998 and the year before he had founded the Simi Kanaeho Linux user group in Simi Valley, California with his friend Dan. So I learned about Linux user groups through him because sometimes he would ask me to go to the lug with him. And I actually loved going to the lug because it was such a fascinating population of people to think about. It was a very diverse population. Women have obviously always been a minority there but I was surprised at the enormous range of ages and interests and people came from such diverse backgrounds. So that group that he founded was one of the groups that led to the beginning of scale. And I remember being at one of these meetings long ago and meeting a high school student named Elon. Does anyone know Elon? He's Scales Conference chair now. So Elon started attending the meetings and participating in the events that were called Lugfest. And it's safe to say that he was the lucky recipient of some pretty solid, informal mentoring in those years. I have observed a lot of mentoring via the lugs and my experience has been that they can be a pretty welcoming place although each group will have their own flavor. So these are some resources that you can use in this immediate area but the groups are all across the country. Last night at the Bad Voltage Show they asked the audience about how new users are coming into Linux. And John O'Bacon mentioned that he was introduced to Linux via a Lug group. So if you're someone who's active in the open-source community you might want to think about how you're introducing Linux to new users. I'm going to share some links of the projects I found that seem to have pretty well established, well documented and robust mentoring programs. Most of these programs are geared at coding specifically but not all of them. So here's a few to start with. The Apache Software Foundation Adora Project Google Summer of Code Ubuntu Women OpenStack actually includes a list of available mentors and their timelines on their website. So what that means is how much time they can devote each week to mentoring, what time zone they're in, what their area of expertise is and what their IRC handle is. Railgirls does their own Summer of Code program and Drupal actually holds an IRC. You can follow Drupal mentoring on Twitter for reminders of the hours and other mentoring events that they'll be offering. The Open Hatch group is based in Boston and it's a really friendly way for people to get involved in open-source. Their goals as an organization are lowering the entry barriers and increasing diversity. They have training missions and outreach events. If you're someone looking for mentoring to look into and get in touch with, one of the things I really like about the Open Hatch group is that it's not just about code. So while it's wonderful to see so many projects or seeing the benefit of adding mentoring to contributing code, there are many more areas in the open-source community where mentoring could be a great match. So I would encourage all of you to think about where mentoring could be of use within the communities that you're a part of. Yoda demonstrates as the mentor to mentor is how to give support to a promising individual, how to offer challenges that will permit one to learn and grow and how to provide vision so that your prodigy will gain confidence and eventually independence. The thing about mentoring is that not everyone can do it because not everyone wants to do it. Not everyone has the right temperament for it. If you're someone who thinks you might want to be a mentor, chances are pretty good that if you're thinking that you could be someone who's going to become a great mentor. The seed's already been planted. In my experience you don't always start off as a great mentor. Years from now you're going to want to go back to some of those people and apologize to them for the things that you said or did or more likely did not do. But that's all part of the process. So one of the things that I read that inspired me to put together this presentation was an article that Rich Bowen of Apache and Red Hat wrote for open-source.com about the life and open-source and the mentors who led the way. If you're at all interested in mentoring I recommend that you take a look at it because Rich talks a little bit about the mentors that he identifies he's had along the way and he talks about easy ways that you can incorporate mentoring into your life and why you would want to do that. Like leaving a legacy that actually matters. Every moment that you invest in another person will extend your impact a little further past your own direct influence. And one of the things that he also talked about is how to find the people that you would like to mentor. This is interesting because a lot of mentoring and open-source as structured by projects happens at random. If you want to be a mentor you tell the project that that's something that you would like to do and then when someone comes along who needs mentoring that's the person who will be assigned to you. But what if you took it a step further on your own and just kept an eye out for the specific individual that you could mentor on a higher level. Just keep your antenna tuned. Talk to people. Talk to people about what lights them up. Talk to them about their goals. You'll pretty quickly find a way that you can dent the universe. So if there's one thing I want you to leave with today. It's the knowledge that you can be a mentor. You can do it. You can make a difference. It feels really good to do that. But you also really need to think about it. Think about what it will require of you. Get yourself prepared. It's a relationship that you're committing to and you're not necessarily going to be able to do it in a big way in every phase of your life. Josh Birkis did an interview in 2009 with IT World and he said being a good mentor requires a lot of time. Frequently more time than it would take you to do the development yourself. For this reason most open source software developers are not temperamentally suited to be mentors. These are some universal qualities that mentors ought to have like patience. A good mentor is going to be patient with you. They're going to be easy to talk to because they're going to want to talk to you. And they'll be the kind of person who honors their commitments. They'll be effective communicators. I once read a mentor must believe in their mentee both personally and professionally. Mentors help fill your knowledge gaps and seek opportunities to help you grow and excel. A mentor is someone with whom you can let down your guard, share your insecurities and ask the stupid questions that we all have sometimes. You want a mentor who knows people, people that you might want to know too. For example, my mentor introduced me to my role model. I didn't know that she knew her but I knew that she knew a lot more super smart and creative people in our field than I do because she's a lot more outgoing and a lot older and she's been in the field a lot longer. So she's the kind of person who's just really good at making connections and that's the kind of mentor that you want to have. Let's talk a little bit about communication in mentoring relationships. Communication is everything but what is the best way to do it? I recently read Sherry Turkel's reclaiming conversation and I read about Ben Weber who's a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and he developed this tool called the Physiometric Badge. What the badge does is it tracks employees' movements through an office and it measures and analyzes a whole range of things in their conversations who they were talking to, how long they talked, what the pace of their speech was, their tone and on. Using that information Weber was able to quantify that face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity. For example, software teams produce less when they talk more. Face-to-face. Weber's study indicates that the same is not true of online encounters. So that's something to keep in mind when you're in a mentoring relationship. There are a lot of collaboration tools that we all know and love that make it possible for mentoring relationships to develop over distance but there's still something to be said for face-to-face relationships. That's just something to keep in the back of your head. The best approach may be the hybrid approach of things for different purposes. For quick exchanges or status updates you might use texting or Twitter. You may use Slack. For a long explanation of something email might be the best because both parties will have the time to read it and reflect upon it before responding. Video chat can work for a regular check-in if you can't make it happen face-to-face and IRC could be a good solution if you're stuck on something. The point is to make sure that you're communicating often. If you're going to be a mentor you're going to get a lot of experience giving and receiving feedback. The learning curve on this can be really steep so I wanted to talk a little bit about feedback and some common approaches. Does anybody know what the sandwich approach to feedback is? The sandwich approach is to start with something positive before going into something negative and then coming back to something positive. An example would be Jen, your presentation today ran smoothly. I didn't agree with most of what you said but I really like the pictures. Some people have objected to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous and undermining your negative feedback. This assumes that the main point you would want remembered from your feedback is the negative part. Namely, you didn't want to talk about my pictures. You wanted to talk about how you didn't agree with what I said. So as a teacher my opinion is that if the point you want carried off in the end is negative you probably shouldn't be mentoring. The point of giving feedback is not to come from a negative place. It's to say, good news, I pinpointed our next objective. I watched what you did there and I saw you really understood this, this, and this. Now we know that what we should focus on next is this. So if you're not able to go into a feedback session with a growth mindset you're probably not going to be super successful as a mentor. It doesn't mean that when your protégé does something wrong, you shouldn't tell them that it was wrong. It means that you can let them know they should do something differently without making them feel like a horrible human being. So some of the people who object to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous with their point being that people know going in that you're just trying to tell them something negative in a nice way. They prefer to use the transparent approach. So the transparent approach works like this. Jen, I wanted to let you know that I didn't really care for your talk. I want to tell you what I didn't like so you can think about it next time. You had told me you were going to talk about open source but all I remember you saying is something about sandwiches. The value in the transparent approach is that right from the start the receiver knows that they're going to hear something honest and maybe uncomfortable. You need to hear these things sometimes but I want to emphasize that it's probably more productive to give feedback that encourages people towards reachable goals. Nine times out of ten they already know something that went wrong. They have a mentor in the first place to help them understand how it could be fixed and how it could go right and how they could do better. So if you believe that it can be fixed too you're automatically going to come at them with a gross mindset to be able to make it a learning session. So raise your hand if you've given any thought to what mentoring means in your life. Pretty good. Do you remember what you said to the person beside you at the beginning about what you were passionate about? Maybe you're ready to follow up on that. January is National Mentoring Month. The initiative was initially developed to encourage adults to mentor youths but hopefully what you've heard today will help you fully understand how mentoring can support anyone regardless of their age. If you need or want a mentor I hope you'll be more capable of finding the right one. And if you want to be a mentor I hope you'll know where to get started. So I would love to hear about the mentoring process in your life. This is how you can contact me and I spelled out my name there because people often forget to email if you'd like to. And if you'd like links to the resources that I mentioned you can email me and I'll send them out to you. I believe we have some time for questions. Anybody? Hold on. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Awesome. Okay. For the video recording I want to repeat that she was plugging and she said I'm going to turn off my audio now. Sorry, Hannah. Hannah asked what advice do you have for winding down a mentoring relationship? Do you mean if you're a mentor or a protege or either one? Both. Probably at that point both people are becoming aware that they're not as much in mutual understanding that they're not as much in mutual need of one another. Some signs of that would be that you're finding it longer between your meetings or you don't feel excited about going to meetings you don't feel excited when you hear from them. That would be a really good conversation to have with them. Sometimes that means that it's time for you to develop some new goals and sometimes that means moving on to a new person sometimes it means revisiting what you've already done and you're going to have to have a conversation where you say I think we've done some great things here I don't want to schedule another meeting that kind of thing I know that you could think of some incredibly nice ways to say that. Thank you.