 Hello, everyone. My name is Geddes, and it's both an honor and a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for having me. And so today I want to talk about open sourcing mentorship. And as a heads up, there will be a time for Q&A at the end of the session, and otherwise after that too, there's also some time in Slack as well. So once again, thank you all for having me. So let's talk about what if. What if there was a resource, a resource for mentors, mentees, and those looking to get started? A resource that provided strategies, advice, content, community support for all things related to mentorship. So this is the resource that I wish existed back in the day. Back when I was just starting my coding journey and I was asking myself, where do I find a mentor? What do we talk about? How do I approach one? And now fast forward to many years later, and now that I'm a quote unquote mentor, there were these new questions like, how do I effectively help, share, and pay it forward? So this is a story of why mentorship is important, the obstacles associated with it, and how my experience has led to this idea of open sourcing mentorship so that we all together can grow it as a community and make mentorship accessible to all. And so as a disclaimer, I am by no means an expert in mentorship. I'm just someone who frankly is thankful for it and believes in the power of it. And I think that's what's great because in order to open source mentorship, we don't need to be experts. We can just contribute our ideas, our thoughts, our questions, feedback, and more. So let's start off by thinking about what is mentorship? And you see, this is such a tricky question because mentorship means different things to people. To some, it's a formal endeavor, to others, it's informal. It can happen in a workplace or it can happen anywhere. Some prefer an agenda, others prefer this more spur-the-moment activity. For some folks, mentorship is this ongoing weekly conversation, while others view it as just like a one-time, 10-minute conversation. Some make the distinction between sponsorship while others view it as one and the same. So in summary, mentorship means different things to people. While this obstacle is that there's no universal one-size-fits-all approach, it also means that there's an opportunity so that we all collectively can contribute, again, our ideas, experiences, thoughts, and more. So when we talk about open source, what do we mean by that? And so by open source, you really mean to be guided by these principles. And the following principles are accredited and found on opensource.com, the open source way. And so thank you to the folks who are out there. And so it's these principles that guide this creation and the connection of the things of mentorship. So for example, transparency, collaboration, to release early and often, this inclusive meritocracy is that mentorship, it's fascinating because it's both universal but also personal. And so universal meaning it's something that we can all experience, positively experience. But it's also personal because how we experience it can depend based on our cultural country, where we find ourselves based on the context, mood, situation, and more. But despite that open-sourcing mentorship is how do we make it so that it's global, it's inclusive, it represents all the different things that we are different, but yet unites us on how we are the same, again guided by these open source principles and technologies. And lo and behold here is that mentorship has this ripple effect. When you help others, it helps you, it helps the community at large. And it's definitely great when we can see these positive ripple effects immediately. But sometimes it can take days, weeks, months, maybe even years before we see the positive change that we had. But we just have to trust that we can make this lasting change. And again, it's a resounding message that when you help others, you help yourself. So let's move on to something else. And it's an important thing, meaning mentorship is still not accessible to all. Despite the benefits, despite the progress made, mentorship is still not accessible to all. So looking at this doodle here that I drew, we have a group of folks, they're surrounded by this yellow-orange vibrancy, they're helping each other, they're guiding each other, they're going onward and upward together. But then there's an individual here and they're a little clouded with uncertainty and confusion. They know of mentorship and they believe in the power of it, but they don't know how to tap into it or access it. And at the same time, the folks in the yellow-orange vibrancy here, they may actually want to help, but they don't know how. So I myself have been in both these situations where I'm outside looking in and where I'm inside thinking, how can I get more people inside this mentoring community? And I want to repeat that one more time is that mentorship is still not accessible to all or it's not just one individual, but there's a plethora of individuals who are wondering like, how do we access that, how can I find a mentor, how do I mentee someone? So how do we bridge these two worlds? We can think about it as, if there were one phrase to unite, it's just about just sharing what you can, when you can, and how you can. Share whatever knowledge you have, experiences you have, whenever you can. Sometimes you may be busy, sometimes you may have more time, sometimes it's minutes, sometimes it's hours, whenever you can. And how you can. Some prefer one-on-one conversations, others prefer writing a blog post, making a video, however you can. And the idea is that you may actually be mentoring already without knowing it because it means different things to people and that's powerful. More so, you may be thinking, oh, I'm not good enough to be a mentor yet or you may be thinking, ah, it's too late. It's too late to mentor. But there may be folks who are not mentoring already and you may, and they can in fact are good mentors or there may be folks who think they wouldn't be good mentors when you can. So open sourcing mentorship is about first connecting ideas, connecting these resources and building a community. There's a lot of good existing work out there, but they're spread out or isolated or they're difficult to find. They may be constantly changing and or they may just be in certain pockets of the community that people are not aware about. So first, it's not about reinventing the wheel, it's about connecting what's out there and unifying them. And now that they're connected is how do we grow this diverse, inclusive and welcoming community behind it so that there is a community, a supportive community for both mentors and mentees and those looking to get started. And now that we have, we've connected what's, what exists, now we get insight on what is missing, meaning we may reveal that there's these gaps that technology open source in particular can help fill. And by being guided by these open source principles, we may find that we need to create certain tooling or services, APIs or other kinds of programs and more. But the fun is that we do it together by the community for the community to benefit everyone and to make mentorship more accessible to all. So now that I've kind of like laid the stage and talked about just the different obstacles of mentorship and just the essence of it, now I want to share really what brought me to this idea of it. Why have I become so involved and so passionate about this idea? And frankly is rewind a few years and at the start of my coding journey, I had these high hopes. You know, there was a bright blue sky with the sunshine shining on me and like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to learning. I'm going to do good with the world and create and build magnificent things. But as I started going through this journey, I started questioning myself, like, am I good enough? And you know, I saw myself compared to peers, to colleagues, to, and more of that they just seem so much more knowledgeable and insightful. And yet here I was being separated by this, this, this crevice, this chasm of, of questions like how do I get from where I am to there? And then I started thinking, am I passionate enough? Meaning I was, I really admired and respected individuals, friends who could just, just seem so involved in something grossed with their, with their computer and their terminal and they were just like coding away. And here I am thinking like, oh wait, you know, what about, what if we took technology and combine it with the humanities, with wellness, with community? What do we create? What kind of world could we help build together? But I thought like, but aren't technologies only supposed to be creating like gadgets and that kind of thing? So I had a misconception there, but I was questioning like, am I passionate enough? And then I thought, well, okay, maybe I'm sort of getting good enough. I sort of like it. I sort of like technology, but do I even belong here? And here I am as this like purple square thinking, I don't feel like I belong. I feel like I'm out of shape because of based on what I was feeling, what I was thinking. Not to say the community seemed very welcoming, but I just didn't know or think like, how am I going to fit in? And so this, these bright blue skies started, it got a little cloudy, not to say there's anything wrong with cloudy. Cloudy is great. But I started thinking, I dropped my backpack of knowledge and I said, you know what? I'm actually just going to stop all together. I don't think I really should be an engineer. I shouldn't be a technologist. But yet I'm here and I'm here thanks to community. I'm here thanks to different people at different stages in my life who helped provide a little bit of guidance or a lot of guidance or helped provide a question that helped create a new insight for information. I'm here thanks to community in so many different ways. And that's why I'm here today. And so in my day to day, I'm both a mentor and a mentee. It's like a flip flop. One day I'm here, one day the next, one hour switches and the other week it's not. And so it's this constant ability of learning and growing and more. But with all of this though, now that I call myself quote unquote a mentor and a mentee, I had these obstacles with mentorship. At first I thought to myself, I don't have the time. I'm not part of a formal program. I'm not an expert. Those are big shoes to fill. What if I give the wrong advice? What if I give too much advice? In fact, I'm good. Why do I why do I even need to pay it forward? Why can I just not focus on myself? So at first I really didn't want to be a mentor thought I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm good. But I realized I'm here thanks to community. It's the least I could do to keep paying it forward so that the community abroad and at large just could be more, more colorful and just more innovative and inclusive and welcoming. And do these conversations realize that there were these frequently asked questions for mentors. So for example, like, why should I mentor? Why do others mentor, you know, everyone's busy and they have things to do. Why do people keep mentoring? Or maybe there was this question, like, am I mentoring already? Or if I'm not, how do I become one? Then it was like, well, I think I want to mentor, but how do I do it? So what's my mentorship style? And or it could just be, where do I even and when do I even mentor? Then it's like, how do I grow as a mentor? And there was a bunch more questions. And so now there were also these frequently asked questions for mentees, meaning where do I find mentors? What do I ask? What do we talk about? How do I grow as a mentee? And more and more questions. And so that brings us to this open source project called mentorship.guide. So that's the link. That's the URL, mentorship.guide. It's right now, it's a seed with a much potential of different ideas that folks have been starting to build, but it definitely needs more water and more encouraging, more ideas from the community so that we can all grow it together. And so now I want to give a glimpse of both mentorship.guide, the open source project, and also how the ideas of it retroactively helped me when I was during the stage of like, do I belong? Am I good enough? Am I passionate enough? So when you come across the site, you will find essentially like three paths. And there's these three paths where like, I'm a mentor, I'm a mentee, or I want to contribute. And each page has a section at the bottom where you can contribute questions, ideas, content, in fact, frequently asked questions and more. And when you, for example, so here we have I'm a mentor, and now we move to, here's a glimpse of the section meaning like, what's my mentorship style, meaning there's different ways that mentorship manifests itself. Because usually, despite it being very unique and personal, there's still these like certain themes and patterns that we can find across different mentoring experiences. And now here's a subset of them, and there's definitely more. And in fact, there may even be a whole bunch of that are missing. Therefore, contribute that and see like, oh wow, we didn't even think about this mentorship style. So here we have an educator. And an educator is really someone who likes to teach and inform and share concepts to help explain and clarify material. And when we think about it, when I was thinking like, oh man, am I good enough? The same people I was comparing myself with and didn't know I could reach were the same people who were actually helping me and teach, and they were educating and helping like build these concepts. So they helped bridge this, these questions and chasm. So I'm like, oh wait, I can, I am good enough, and I can keep learning and I can keep growing. So that was an educator type of mentoring that was for my peers. And now we have maybe some, maybe more like an encourager listener. And here instead of teaching, what one is doing is really just providing encouragement, reminding folks of like, you can do this, you got this. Or they're more just like listening actively, like just venting your frustrations, like I'm just here to listen and be here for you. And going back to this idea when I thought like, am I passionate enough? I had certain folks who made me realize like, hey, Gettys, yes, you may not be the one that creates the next iPhone 1000 or a new kind of Wi-Fi standard, but you may be one of the ones who combines technology with community and other areas. And before I knew it, I realized there were other folks and individuals who had the same aspiration like someone to take technology and combine it with music, with the arts, with the sciences, with humanities and more. And so I realized we all enjoy technology and believe in the power of it and we can make it personal based on all our other interests and passions and more. So I realized actually, I am passionate enough. And I was thanks to these like mentors who were encouraging and listening. And now we have other mentorship style defined as more of a finder or a connector. Here again, you're not necessarily educating or not necessarily encouraging, which is great too. You're more like, I don't have the answer myself, but let's find it together. Let's try to solve this together. Let me search around and you search around and let's compare and contrast. Or it's more of a connector, meaning I know what you're looking for. Let me connect it with someone else. Or here's a resource or here's a book or here's a video and so you can be a finder or connector. And so going back to do I belong and am I out of shape? Or individuals who said, get this, bring yourself to this community and make that much more eclectic. And then people were connecting me with other individuals and I realized, oh, wow, you think that way or you feel that way like, oh, me too, or I don't. And that was cool. Like I was realizing, wow, this community is so, so, so colorful. And I wanted to be a part of it and I realized actually I do belong here. And again, so there's different mentorship styles. You can learn more at mentorship.guide. But just to give you another snippet on the site itself, you're finding different forms of mentorship, meaning it's so funny how you can decompose and remix and view mentorship from different perspectives because there's like different, there's different structures. Some prefer informal, some prefer more formal. What types of questions do you like? Do you like broad questions? Do you like specific questions? What type of responses do you like to give? Do you like to give more targeted pointing questions or do you like to give a question in return? It depends on how often you like to have it, how engaged you want to be. Who wants to take the lead? Is it you or is it going to be the mentee? Overall, what's great is there's different mentorship styles, there's different forms of mentorship for you. And if there isn't, share that because other people may also find that, may connect with that. And at the same time, we'll find more of this larger all table of contents where people share, why am I mentoring? Or kind of by mentoring programs like connect bridge, all these different things. And so please keep contributing more content just so we can make it all accessible to people. So if we were to really think about mentorship, it's just share what you can, when you can and how you can. It has this profound ripple effect that affects people in so many different ways. I definitely wouldn't be here without community and I spoke into others who feel the same way. Sometimes it's a small ripple, sometimes it's a large ripple, but it has this lasting change because now you've impacted the generation and sometimes it may be a 10 minute conversation and you may never hear from them again. But trust me, that could have had a lot of big impact or you may have this like ongoing, ongoing conversations and you constantly hear from them. So mentorship has this big ripple effect. And the call to action here is really contribute questions, ideas, feedback, what can be improved, what should be reinforced on the site, you'll find again the code of conduct, the contributing guide, existing content, each page has a page where you can contribute more content and questions. But really, so one, yes, contribute at the mentorship guide, reach out to me. But really, if there's another one thing you can really do is just take the time to think of someone who helped you in some way. And send them a message, give them a call, a text, like email, anything, doesn't have to be long, just something that says, hey, you know, thank you for that one time dot, dot, dot. I really appreciated that and it really helped me in some way. And one, because of gratitude, but also to just reinforce the idea that we're all rippling with each other and we can have this positive, beneficial effect that just extends for years to come. So once again, thank you very much. It's both a pleasure and it was an honor to reach out. This is just the starting of a conversation. Definitely hope to continue. Have more conversations. We'll meet online and talk online and continue this more. So I'm not going to open up to Q&A, which we're going to do through the chat window. And at the same time, we'll overflow it to Slack if there's more questions there. So thank you all very much. And again, share what you can, when you can, how you can. Thank you. Hello there again. So I'm starting to type into this chat window that happens in technical difficulties there. So instead, I'm going to verbally answer some of these and then encourage everyone to check out the guide and also connect with me so we can continue this conversation both on Slack and et cetera. So one question was, where are good places to advertise for either mentors or mentees and various topics? That's a great question. There are a few off the top of my head. There's one called codingcoach.io. There's definitely with Linux Foundation's community bridge program, but really this actually hits the heart of it. There isn't a centralized place, at least that I know of yet, and perhaps we can make mentorship.guide become that place. So but definitely please, let's continue that because I think it's such a fascinating question because even I myself, I'm struggling like where do we go? And so that means like there's a gap there that we can help solve. So good question. Similarly, do we have a directory of mentors and subjects? There is a for mentors, the ones that again, I know of codingcoach.io, the Linux Foundation community bridge. And then there's a whole bunch of different sites throughout, like depending on what you're interested in, like Node, for example, there's a community mentorship community behind that and more. But again, I think this is a great area where we can start collating and collecting these together. Let's see, what's another one here? The overall, I think I have about one more minute. Maybe not. Yes, I do. Maybe one more minute. Yes. So we're almost done. Thank you all, everyone for these great questions. There's definitely some I missed right now, but we're going to continue them in Slack channel and please reach out just so we can continue this. It's great to be to talk about these things, to talk about how can we do it? How can we, how can we just make the world a better place through mentorship? Once again, thank you very much. So it's so endeared to be speaking here today. Catch you in a bit.