 Okay, so, yeah, thank you for joining our session on Mentor and Menti Framework. Just a couple of quick introductions. So I'm Mark Boost, CEO of Civo. I've had about a 20-year career in technology companies mixed from cyber security, telecommunications, data centres, and then more recently, Civo's cloud computing company. But yeah, we're here today to talk about the Mentor and Menti framework that we're developing, canal myself. This is going to be released at QCon in Amsterdam. So it's still a work in progress. We've got some details at the end about how you can get more involved in that and contribute to it. We'll be creating a GitHub page where people can contribute to that. That's a little bit about me, Cunal. My name is Cunal, I have 20 months of experience. I graduated this year and I've been contributing to open source since my freshman year. I love content creation, I love DevRel, I love cloud native. And we want to talk about our experiences. Yeah, it's also worth mentioning that I currently mentor two people, Cunal, and also someone else that works at Civo. Okay, so to kick things off, I'm going to hand over to Cunal. I was going to talk a little bit about finding a mentor. So I often times get this question, like how do we find a mentor? And sometimes people reach out to you, like, hey, I have this question, or they just sometimes just say, hi. And without knowing much about the person, you sometimes often reach out to them. And oftentimes I get a question, hey Cunal, can you help me with blockchain? I've never done blockchain in my life. So this is a slide for that. Ensure that the mentors that you are looking forward to, they are also well suited to your interests and your goals. So you want to get into a specific technology or if you, the way I look at it is, I also try to resonate with other people, like what sort of experiences did they have when they were 20 years old? And I would like to do that as well. So make sure that you do that. And the second thing is how to get in touch. Social media is great for that. It's pretty obvious. Follow people on social media, but not just follow them. The way, what I mean by following is networking. So actually being interested in what the work they are doing, learning more from their experiences, and just engaging with them and seeing what they're up to. Don't be afraid to reach out. It's another good point when we follow up on social media. So you're all at KubeCon. So you might find so many amazing speakers over here that you can think, okay, I would be interested in what they're working on. Let's ask them for help or mentorship or their experiences. So don't be afraid to reach out to people. And there are some of the obvious statements like be polite and make sure you're giving enough context. So don't just say hi. Most of the time, people do that. So don't be afraid to reach out. Most of the time, folks may reply, but only if you give enough context. So make it easy for the person to help them help you. And yeah, this is the point I was mentioning. Reach out in a professional manner. So like, hey, my name is Kunal and this is, these are my experiences and this is what I'm looking forward to. I saw your talk or I saw your blog post or I'm really passionate about this technology. So you have work in them. So that's, you're giving enough context and you're reaching out respectfully and politely. Demonstrate your dedication to learning and your passion for the subject. I really like to bring in like, this is concept of like proof of work and just showing responsibilities or like enthusiasm. Like, hey, I would like to learn more about this and this is what I've already researched or what I was another mentor. We'll be like, oh, they are genuinely interested. Like he's done his research and he's done this and he's done that. So make sure that your dedication is also and you're learning passion for the subject. It's also clear in the beginning. I'd like to hand over to Mark for developing a clear plan for your mentee. Thank you. Before we get into that actually, we're going to do a couple of Slido questions. Yeah, we had some of the questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kunal loves a Slido question. So if you can just scan this, this is by the way completely anonymous. So no personal data is here and you just scan this from your phone and you'll be presented with a set of questions. So just trying to gather more information and folks who are joining virtually, you can also take part in this. You can still see the QR code on screen. So this one is for mentors only. People who are looking to mentor. So you can share if you are currently a mentor, have previously been a mentor or you're looking to mentor some people or if you're not looking to mentor. That's quite interesting. So there's been some previous mentors here, what looks a bit. And some people are currently mentoring quite a lot. And some people are looking to mentor. And a few are not looking to mentor. Interesting. Next one. Next one. This one is for the mentees. By the way, this is not limited by age. So even if you're looking to be a mentee, if you're like, you know, you're just starting with cloud native irrespective of how old you are, definitely go for it. It looks like there's a few people who are currently a mentee. Some people are looking for one. Some people have previously been a mentee quite a lot. So I was kind of thinking it could be quite fun after us to do a bit of a speed dating of trying to put together the mentees and the mentors. So we should get everyone out after and try and do that. Cool. You want to get back into the? There's one more. Oh, there's one more. Oh yeah, of course. So if you just write some of the challenges you face as a mentee, it will populate in the word cloud. For folks who are just joining us, you can scan this QR code and take part in the fun little survey. It's completely anonymous. Or if you're a mentee, okay. What about me? Say if you're a mentee or if you have a mentee as a mentee, then you can also share what some of the challenges your mentees face. Yeah, we might pick some of these up at the end as well if we've got some time to discuss some of those. So it's communication and goal-oriented people, finding a mentor, good communication, that's a good one. Four more people typing, we'll move forward. Okay. Should we move on? Lot of good points that we've already planned to cover in this session. I think we're joining. All right, leave that open so you can. Okay, so the next point we wanted to discuss was developing a clear plan. And I think when you're creating that relationship, you've got to make sure each of us is getting what they want from that relationship between the mentor and the mentee. And first of all, we've got to agree a frequency of how often you should meet and discuss all the different goals and things that you can learn. So for now, myself, we do fortnightly meetings. That's what we've found is best. Sometimes weekly feels too often, especially if I set some tasks or some things. It's not long to come back and, you know, we later to review those. So I think the fortnightly feels really good for us. And also monthly feels too long that you've got too much time passes. So that's what our recommendation is is to agree that that sort of fortnightly frequency. Agree a session format as well. And don't be too rigid with that. It's really important to have some sort of structure to the way it works. And the way that we do things generally is we pick a subject for each session. We've talked about things like leadership. We've talked about time management. We've talked about... I think you've mentioned we've talked about finances. You said, how can you help me with my personal finances? You know, so it doesn't have to be work-related as well. So we do it session by session basis and have a focus. But sometimes we just have a general catch-up, don't we, and just talk about other things as well, just whatever comes up. So don't be too rigid, you know, keep it fluid. And then also it's really important to have both some short-term and long-term objectives. So we put together a five-year plan and that was jointly agreed. So it wasn't just me saying that this is what you're going to do for five years. It was something that we agreed together, made sure it aligned with canal's interests, made sure it aligned with his goals, and had some short-term objectives as well that he can tackle quite quickly, but aim for those longer ones over time as well. So it's important to have a really strong plan in that sense. Okay, back over to you. I'm going to just share a little bit about how to be a good mentee. So this is once after you've found a mentor. And the first one is the most important one. It's also at conferences like this, you know, matter of code of conduct. So please respect your mentor. Their time is valuable, and you should realize they have a busy schedule. So he's a CEO, so I know he's pretty busy. And if you show some responsibility with your mentors, then they would also appreciate it. If you talk a general example of, let's say, open source, so you get stuck at, you're contributing to a project, you get stuck somewhere, you ask the maintainers, okay? I'm stuck here, what do I do? So most of the time, they will just direct you to a resource. They'll be like, hey, this is what you can check out or whatever. If they don't have the right answer, they won't give you the right answer on spot. They will just give you resources. So you have to value their time. Other than that, honour your commitments. And what I mean by that is if you have commitments, like for example, if you have set a meeting and you're late to that meeting, now that's wasting the time of the mentors as well. And don't be late. So honour your commitments. If they're relying on you for something, make sure you do that. And you can also be considerate of their busy schedule. So for example, if someone reschedules a meeting at the last minute, your mentor, so you should be, take that into account because you know that they have a busy schedule. It's a two-way relationship. It's not just the mentor giving it back to the mentor. It's both ways. So it's a mentor helping the mentor as well. And there are various ways by which you can just get started. So in the previous slides we mentioned, follow people on socials. That's fine, Kunal, done. What next? So contribute. Contribute to community, open source projects. You can do writing. You can advocate for stuff on socials. You can offer help or support wherever possible, like they're running an event or the company's running some initiatives or if it's an open source project, then there are so many showcases here. I met so many students who were actually helping out at the maintainer tracks as well. Which is pretty amazing because CNCF has the LFX program. So many mentees graduate from them. And after that, they become the maintainers. So the mentor, so mentees become the mentors after a while. So offer help and support wherever possible, be polite and respectful. Pretty self-explanatory. Help pass it over to Mark, how to be a good mentor. Thanks, Kunal. I think the first point I want to make here really is about empathy. I think that's the most important thing when you've been a mentor. To build trust with the mentee. It's not going to work. The relationship is not going to work if you can't build that trust and openness. It should be not just about them and the work that they're doing. It should be more than that. It should be again to know them as a person, again to know their personal interests. What movies do they watch? Recently with the other mentee that I work with, we were talking about all the different Netflix series that they watch. He was recommending some to me. I was recommending some to her. We got to know each other, found some common ground, but also asked her brothers and sisters she had and things like that. Got to know them as a person, what her interests were growing up, what interests are away from work as well. So I think it's important if you're going to build that trust and relationship to find that common ground and understand each other. Similar to what Kunal said, it's a two-way relationship and it's not just about the mentor always just talking to the mentee saying, I've been there, I've done it, I've seen it. There's a lot you can actually learn the other way as well. And you want to make sure you provide an opportunity for people to challenge you. Maybe you shouldn't, maybe Kunal's got ideas he does challenge me quite a lot actually. Sometimes we talk about subjects and he might say, well, I don't agree with that. And I think that's a really, you can create that environment where people can actually do that and have that empathy for each other that if we question each other, it's not done in a way that's unprofessional. It's just that we respect each other and we respect each other's opinions. So, and also I think it's really important as a mentor, I think I can learn from the mentee and there's an expression of, you can't teach old dogs new tricks, but Kunal's always teaching me things and probably more on things like TikTok and social media and things that I don't understand because I'm quite old now, but yeah, so I think given that platform survey can actually contribute back as well like the point that Kunal made before. And I think it's important really to be available for your mentee away from these structured sessions. They might have some questions and they should feel comfortable to be able to ask those to call you. Maybe there's something personal in the personal life that's happening and then they want to reach out and speak to you. So, making yourself available for them is really important. So, again, build that empathy, build that trust that's so important. And the other thing that we always do is we say, look, let's make these sessions fun. They're not just about pure learning. That's what you said about sometimes we have a more of an unstructured session where we just talk about general things, about life in general and things like that. So, have some fun with it because if we learn our best when we're having fun and we're enjoying things. And what's going on? Yeah, now it's another point very important which is reviewing your progress. I've been following this ever since I was in my freshman year. So, the way I do it is having some goals and then periodically syncing within yourself and once you have a mentor and with your mentor they're helping you. Like, okay, this is what we planned for the next three months. This is where we are and this is how we're doing. So, when I was in, let's say the, so I've been a part of a lot of mentorship programmes when I was a student, like Google some of code, CNCF internships or whatever. There also you get a mentor and they review it periodically every month with you. Like, okay, the first evaluation, second evaluation, these are the projects that we wanted to do and stuff like that. So, it's going to be very helpful for people who mentor in such programmes as well to their mentees. It gives you what's the word I'm looking for, retrospective. So, it gives you an opportunity to retrospect on the previous cycle. And create an environment for honest and constructive feedback. There are two types of people. If you give someone constructive feedback, they will be like, okay, be honest with me, tell me, where am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? Some people take it too hard. I'm personally like more on the open side, like tell me what I'm doing wrong and I can improve it. So, it's also about how you take it. The mentor is, people are saying that you can improve or something because of your benefit only. So, you should take that into consideration. You should not take that too hard. Constructed criticism in general, you should never take it too hard. If someone is just saying you don't know anything, that's not constructive criticism, right? So, honest and constructive feedback, you should always create an environment for that and you should take that very seriously. Okay, just to round up, I guess, the comeback to empathy really, empathy is the key. I believe that building that trust and that relationship. So, it's about having that openness, getting to know each other, building common ground, being trustful with each other and respectful with each other. So, that's really important. And then, similar to what Kenal was saying about honest feedback, we should create an environment where we can talk openly and honestly, but it should be seen as constructive. And sometimes, there are things that people have to learn to improve and they're gonna always help you develop. Like Kenal says, maybe no one likes being criticised as such, but if it can be delivered in a constructive way, but flip side on the other side, the person has to receive it in the way that it was intended. So, it's trying to get that balance right and to make sure it's professional and it's constructive in that regard. And yeah, as I said, don't take it to heart, I think. The most important thing here is reflect, take time to reflect, you know? I said, some criticism can be, you can take it a bit more personally sometimes, but it's important just to reflect on that and especially if you've got that empathy in the relationship, you know, you can really build and learn from that by reflecting later. Must find common ground. This is really important. You must find that common ground and have that trust built in. I've probably mentioned that a few times now, but it's really important that you do build that common ground and trust between each other. And if all else fails, probably find another mentor, because if you try, you know, we're both trying to be as empathetic as we can, but sometimes maybe it's just not meant to be and find another mentor. It's not working out. It's with each other again. You know, this is not working. I think we should find someone else, but certainly try everything else first, but if it's not working, don't carry on in a way. Yeah, you can reduce the risk of this when we started with the first slide, which is find the mentors you can resonate with and with common interests. Yeah. Hasn't happened with me ever. Yeah. Okay, so. So we have no shaniae question. Yeah, oh. Thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. So I just had one question. So in terms of this mentor-mentee model, if you're having a one-to-one mentor-mentee model, that's pretty straightforward that you're really deeply engaged with the mentee and from mentee side, they're deeply engaged with the mentor. But in case where a mentor is training or interacting with multiple mentees, how do you do that context-switching and maintain that empathy towards each and every mentee? Because depending on the size of an organisation, they could be one-to-one or one-to-even 20 mentees at the same time. So how would you do that context-switching? Sorry, I've missed some of that. Can you talk a bit louder? Is that okay? Okay, just go. Yeah, he might be there for miles. So what I was asking was that, so basically if you're having a one-to-one mentor-mentee model, that would be easier to maintain because you're just dedicated towards one person. But in case a mentor is mentoring more than one person, so probably 10, 15, 20 people. So how do you maintain that empathy towards all of the mentees and how difficult would it be doing that context-switching between multiple mentees? It's kind of like running a company, if you know what I mean. Yeah, I guess the mentorships I do are on a one-to-one basis. So I've not done mentorships where there's a group of people. So we have those one-to-one sessions. I'll let you say it. I guess, yeah, as a CEO, I guess I'm talking to people in general, sometimes not formally mentoring, but offering advice. But it comes back to the empathy, isn't it? It's trying to understand people, treat each person individually, as well, and giving them enough time, share your time around where you can. It depends on the environment that you're doing it, of course. But I think it's not treating everyone the same, as well. I think it's really important to understand each individual and what actually motivates them, what makes them tick, the best way that they learn. It's harder in a group because you have to present it to everyone. But I think I would try and include people and make sure it's fully inclusive, give enough attention to every person within that kind of environment. With me, I have a community. So I started a Discord channel. It has 55,000 people on it now. So even though they learn from the content I create or whatever, I can't physically, it's impossible for me to engage with every single person. And if you have, let's say, students contributing to your projects, say 20, 30 students, so some of the slides that we had, like an empathy one, good communication practices, being polite, respectful, these qualities are not limited by numbers. Everyone can implement those. But I think if you're talking about, if you have a group, that actually, I believe, makes things a little bit more easier because now you have a learning environment where people are also, basically you have, the way I like to put it, if you're having 20 people, now you have 20 mentors because they are also learning and being a beginner is one of the best skills that you can have. That was a quote from Matt from the last CubeCon. There was a session on marketing six. So being a beginner is one of the best skills you can have. And if you're learning together in public with other beginners, I think that should be pretty good for you. So if you have one mentor, 20 mentees, and we talked about mentors are also learning from mentees, so you're all a bunch of 21 mentees learning from each other. I can say that because I have a community been teaching in universities and programming boot camps since like five years across India and now in London. So yeah, that works really well. So I would recommend that. Thank you for the question. Okay, first of all, great slides. I don't see them in the sked. So I would love to have them in the sked so I can use them for reference later. So if you could upload that, that would be great. My questions are of two parts. So your last slide said, if you cannot find the right mentor, look for another one, makes sense. Let's just inverse the cases. You are a mentor and the mentee is in. What happens if that mentee is not ideal? Maybe the first impression was nice, but as time grows, you realize that mentee was not ideal. What do you do in that scenario? Should I ask the next question or would you like to answer this first? Hello, I'd probably say, that hasn't happened to me, so I haven't got a personal experience with that. But again, it comes back to if it's not working, you've got to be honest with each other, haven't you? Whoever is on the canal side on my side, we've got to be honest with each other. It's not this relationship that's not working. Then you've got to make a change, haven't you? You've got to be honest enough to bring that up and raise it and not just carry on for the sake of it if it's not working. And yeah, I guess in that situation, if I felt a mentee was turning up late and it wasn't really taken on board some of the comments and things that I'd mentioned from the couple of weeks before or something, maybe there'd be a point where I'd say respectfully, this is not working, I'm putting a lot of effort in here, but it's not that two-way thing, it's the take, but there's no give. So I think it would just be bringing that up, making aware of it and then hopefully improve. But if ultimately it's not working, then there's that point where you have to still separate. Do you want to add to that? I'll just add one thing, that if you're following the framework that you mentioned, it won't happen instantaneously because you mentioned that you're reviewing your progress like every three months or whatever. So the point where your mentee would say, hey, this is not working out would be if you're not, if it's going on for like one iteration, two iteration, three iteration, it won't be like you're doing good and then on one day your mentee is like, oh, this isn't working. So it's not like this, the graph, the graph is like this. Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you so much. That was a beautiful answer. The second one is just the invert of that. The initial impression of the mentee may not be good, but after some review period, they turn out to be great. So how do you spot that talent? Because I've seen some great talent out there who initially, if I am in a group of my community, everyone else might say, okay, this is not an ideal mentee, but I sense that this person has some potential and after some time that potential is proved. So how do you spot that potential in the initial phase because although that potential might come after some review period like this graph, but initially it's very hard to detect. So how do you use your experience or any tips like that to spot that initially, which others might just ignore unintentionally? Yeah. I think the first thing comes back to what I mentioned before about getting to understand the person before you get into all the, any formal kind of mentorship, understand their interests, what motivates them. Every person is an individual, learns in a different way. So if you can understand them, how they like to learn, do they prefer a more structured approach? Do they need a more fluid approach? So I think it's trying to understand each individual person, what makes them tick and then trying to come up with a plan that works for them. And then the review process, I guess, if it's not working again, how can we change that up for them? But hopefully just trying to lower the chances of it not working out by trying to understand them to start with spending more time up front to understand that individual. And hopefully if that trusts there, that will come out and there will be, the best of them will come out as time goes on. Trying to help them, get that out of them, I guess. Yep, I agree. Thank you. Yeah, that's one of the front. Hey, I may have missed the very beginning of the talk, but can you explain a little bit more about what's going on with CNCF students? With CNCF students? Yeah, we didn't cover it yet. So I was having a conversation with Priyanka, and I have a meeting schedule after QCorn because everyone was busy. So the idea with the CNCF students is there's a GitHub repository for now that Bill started. It's not active as of now. Apart from that, there's the need about the mentorship programmes. So there's Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, LFX, and there's one called Cross. Is it Cross? The research one? Yeah, so these are the ones that are really active. And for CNCF students, there's the official community.cncf.io where there are, that is also active, many events happening. I know some people like Sergio conducting some events in Spanish and things like that. The thing that is missing right now is a structure. So it's not structured. It's like everything is here and there. So you know how you have SIGs and you have chairs and everything? We don't have that for the student, CNCF student community, as of yet. That is what I was speaking to Priyanka about, and we will do that after QCorn. So there's a GitHub repository, CNCF slash students. Everything is documented over there. Some new initiatives as well like the CNCF ambassadors. So planning something to do like that with students. But everyone's busy. That's the problem. And if you want to see the documented stuff, it's CNCF slash students. Thank you for the question. Okay. Thank you so much. Your talk and any last... I mean, I think we might have time for one more. Just one thing I'll add as well. We're going to be building this framework, as I mentioned. So if you do want to get involved, I'll come and see us. Follow Seval and we'll announce more details about the GitHub link when we've got it and all that kind of stuff related to it. So, but yeah, we want contributions. We want people to challenge this framework and come up with something that's quite cool for people. And if you're going to get involved in CNCF students, join the CNCF Slack and there's a students channel. Thank you.