 Thank you for coming. I appreciate this. This is the mentoring working group and you talk. My name is Nate Waddington. I am a developer advocate with the CNCS. Unfortunately, my code speaker, Jay Tahima, couldn't make it today, but he did send a video along, so I'll let him introduce himself a little bit later on in the presentation. So just to start, what is the mentoring working group? So when I started at the CNCS a couple of years ago, I was brought on as a developer advocate and my primary role was technical writing, helping projects build out, organize and write their documentation and move it further along. I became interested in some of the mentorship work that Ihor was doing and so I started working with him and then when he unfortunately had to step away and help defend Ukraine, I stepped into the management of the CNCS mentorship program pretty fully at that point to help out. Now Ihor has some pretty big shoes to fill and so we thought, well, maybe this isn't, maybe this is too much for one individual and we thought, well, we are an open source community and we thought the mentorship program can be by the community and for the community and that's the main idea of the mentorship working group. We approached the TAG contributor strategy team and they agreed that this was likely a good spot to house the mentorship working group and so we put together a charter and sort of went through what we wanted out of a mentorship program and this is what we came up with for a mission statement. We wanted to encourage cloud native computing adoption by providing opportunities for a diverse group of new contributors to work on CF projects with experienced mentorship and so we're looking to that point to have experienced mentors and we want to help grow experienced mentors. We want to help grow projects by bringing in new contributors who maybe haven't ever contributed before and maybe who have. We want to promote growth and sustainability of the projects through mentoring and new existing contributors so we want the mentorship programs to help our projects grow in a sustainable way. We want to be able to encourage mentorship. We want mentees to have a path to mentorship to maintainership. We want to help the entire contributor cycle through the mentorship program and we want to provide support and advice to CNCF projects around mentorship initiatives. Again, this is a community. We want people to be able to have questions and we want new mentors and new projects that are coming on board to say, hey, how can I participate in the mentorship program? What is a good proposal? What would be a way to help recruit mentees and such? Again, that was the mission statement. Some of our goals, again, increasing a project participation in mentorship programs. We want to increase the number of CNCF projects and mentee participation in the LFX program. Right now, we've got on average 14, so in the LFX, the CNCF LFX program specifically, we've got about usually between 14 and 20 projects and usually that's around about 10, so projects is a loaded term. There are many meanings for projects. So there are about 14 mentorship programs running that represent about 10 projects per LFX semester, for instance. So I'd like to increase that. I'd like more projects to be able to avail of themselves of this program. I'd like to increase the quality of mentorship that CNCF projects provide across all of the mentorship initiatives that we run. And that includes feedback that includes figuring out how best to recruit strong mentees and how to bring mentees along to ensure that they've got the best experience as a mentee as we can. Explore the quality of, oh, I said mentorship. I was thinking mentee ship. I should read my slides more closely. This is my first talk in a very long time, so please bear with me. We also want to increase the quality of mentorship. So to that, we'd like to potentially start looking at training programs for mentors, or not necessarily a program, that might be a too, too grandiose, but how can we help coach mentors to be mentors? This is something that we'd like to bake into this working group. Explore opportunities for CNCF participation in new mentorship initiatives. Currently, we've got four main programs, three main programs that we participate in in a regular basis, one program that we participate in irregularly, and a new program that we're just starting up. And so we're looking to see how we can, as a community, figure out what programs, like Google Summer of Code, like Outreach, what programs are valuable for our contributors and our projects and our community. We want to increase the diversity of participants, both mentees and mentors. We want to increase the types of projects that we work through. That includes both code and non-code. I like to tell people, yeah, we do a lot of technical mentorships, but there's space for non-tech contributions. If you're a writer, if you're a designer, if you're a project manager, even there's likely work for you. And if we can attract mentors and mentees from various parts of our community to help mentor people in these non-traditional sort of spaces for us, non-traditional for us, I think that's fantastic. Projects often come to me and say, hey, I need help with my website. If we can bring on web designers, that would be a spectacular use of the mentorship program. And of course, do develop mentorships just generally throughout our programs. And the title of this talk is The Mentoring Working Group and You. And like I said earlier, there's a lot of work to do. We set this up because it's probably too much for one individual is why I've got a co-share. And we went to the contributor experience group because we need to recruit folks who can help with the mentorship program, not just offering to have their project do mentorship. That's important too. But I would very much like to bring people into the program. And part of that is recognizing what the benefits are to the projects. We're able to bring in new contributors. And again, the goal of the mentorship program is to bring those new contributors in and have them stay. I would very much like to in future start getting statistics around what our graduates job prospects are. Are they first off contributing a year later, six months later? Are they using this to get work in other places? Better documentation. It's another big opportunity. I think that we can reach out to communications programs and folks like that and try to get the documentation. I very much like it when developers write documentation, but I can see that sometimes they need help. And this is a great opportunity to do that. Diversity, again, the more people, the more types of people we bring in, the stronger we are. And I think another opportunity or another bonus for participating as a project is again, if your primary career is as a developer, it will help develop leadership skills. And these are the types of things that you can do your promo packs and whatnot. And I would be very interested to see how mentors report this and how mentorship helps mentors' careers throughout the process. So the programs that we are currently working on or working with, I'm not gonna go quite in this order. We have the Google Summer of Code, which is a fairly large program. And the CNCF joins that as an org member generally. And so what that means is we help organize our projects to write the proposals and recruit folks to apply. But it is Google's program. And so they are looking for very new people to open source in terms of mentors. But in terms of the projects, any CNCF project incubating Sandbox or graduated can apply and we can help with that process. They run this once a year and we just finished it. Well, actually I shouldn't say we just finished it. We have finished, I think, 17 of 18 projects. And one of the things that Google has changed for this year is the ability to be flexible. So a couple of the projects actually ask for extensions based on the work that the mentee and the mentor were doing. And when they both agree, we're able to extend a project for almost two months. So we do have still one project extending on the Google Summer of Code for this year. The Season of Docs is another great program that Google was running. This one I believe we could also run as an org. This year due to time constraints, we actually asked individual projects to participate as individual projects. So we had, I think, five projects this year participate in Google Summer of Docs. And again, even if we don't have the capacity to be an org, that doesn't mean that we just go away and aren't going to help. If you've got questions about how to run the process or how to apply or even looking at mentee applications and such, we can help with that type of thing. Outreachee is a project that specializes in bringing folks who are, but I reached primary goal is to increase diversity in tech. And so they are looking for folks of color. They are looking for folks from different regions. They are looking for women to participate, people with different sexual orientations and whatnot. And this is a project which is mostly driven from the project level. But we are looking for help. We are currently looking for somebody to help us administrate this program from the CNCF site. So this is something we've been participating in infrequently, but we want to increase our footprint there. And then there, lastly, is the LFX, the CNCF LFX mentorship. And this is the one that we run in-house. And so this is actually the most flexible of the projects. And these are all paid, I should mention, these are all paid programs for the mentees. So the mentees all get paid for usually like a four, three or four month term. And so because we are running this, this is where we can really be creative with how we want to run a mentorship. If you've got an idea about a mentorship that doesn't fit a traditional tech model, run it by us. We've got folks who are interested in helping out and helping projects to get some of these projects, like I said, designers, project managers, doc writers, we can facilitate that work. Again, because we run it, some of the terms can be flexible if it's possible to do an eight month term if that was something of value. So now I would like to, and again, bear with me here because Jay just sent me the video last night. The other thing that we're doing is we're looking at expanding into new programs. And we're working with Jay Tehima out of New Zealand with IEI. And this is the first, I believe, regional mentorship program that we've started working on to see if we can do mentorship in a specific place and use that as a template to encourage mentorships and mentee in other places. So I'm going to let Jay introduce himself here. I'd like to slide, Joe. Kia ora, QCon, Detroit. My name is Jay. I'm a community leader for IINZ and coach here at the Mentoring Working Group under CNCF. Before I kick off, I just want to give a quick thank you for this opportunity. It's my first time being able to speak at QCon and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. I also want to give a shout out to Hippie and the rest of my team from IEI who's currently in attendance and also shout out to my brother, Nate, who's representing in my absence. For anyone who's wondering about my introduction, so a brief cut of care or prayer to open things up and also my pepuhar or an introduction, both of which can be pretty customary down here in New Zealand or Aotearoa, also known as the land of the long white cloud. So I was invited on board with IEI roughly six months ago to help with developing an Indigenous mentoring program to support Māori into tech pathways and open source. It was a bit of a challenge because my background's not in tech at all, so it's a huge learning curve for me and also there's a slow overall Indigenous representation in the tech space, roughly 4% for Māori, around 2.5% for Pacific Islanders and for other underrepresented groups such as women, sitting around 27%. There's a lot of groundwork for us to do in terms of how we can bridge that gap and also in general just really limited awareness of people around what open source and cloud even is and how it might benefit communities. So from there, my team and I, we adopted a tiā Māori or Māori worldview approach with a modified design thing methodology to better understand that space. What are the barriers and sticking points with people and perhaps ideating some solutions? So we created things like learning resources and providing partners into training and certification, marketing strategies and even providing professional development for local high school teachers. The most critical to that was working alongside local community, education providers, industry and government to help bridge that gap. We took part in an annual career expo to better understand what other people know as we're talking to local schools, students, teachers, businesses, families, homeschoolers, however, just to introduce them to things like Linux and open source and Rice Beauty, Pi and Kubernetes. And for a lot of people, it's their first time even hearing some of these sorts of things. So really good learning for us in terms of what better steps do we need to take to help, you know, talk about how career options and their direction might be a little bit more attainable and accessible for people. From there, we developed our own event called Straight to the Source, which is a lot more focused. We're working with the local girls high school to try and understand how we could strengthen the connection between education and industry. So we're talking about certifications and Kubernetes, things like women in Linux and LFX mentorships. And again, working alongside local businesses, council and universities to try and understand that space collaboratively. From there, we pretty much determined that it's probably too soon to develop a specialized mentoring program. So instead at the moment, we're trying to broaden pathways into digital tech for multi-general. So we want to develop more tangible projects where people can seek the benefits and practice and then understand why different training opportunities are going to be really critical and be able to support that. So things like community digital infrastructure like here in Tauranga and the rural areas like Tokoroa, partnering with national cloud providers and we're in the process of hopefully developing a curriculum for secondary and high school tertiary learners, sorry, to be able to again provide more relevant industry training for people to step into and also supporting them into existing development opportunities like LFX and Google Summer of Code. So if anyone would like to support us or we're more than keen to be able to connect and learn from other people's expertise in terms of how can we map the pathways better. Most people aren't even familiar with concepts like contribution so they'll be really beneficial for us to help shape that messaging and not just so that people can pursue career pathways in tech but just that they belong and how transformational it can be for their communities in general. Open source is really inspiring for me personally in terms of what it's the values and tenets that it's built upon and how they might be able to help people with all areas of our lives. That's pretty much it for me just to close out and leave with the shorefuckin' Toki or Māori proverb Nākū te rōrō Nō te rōrō kā ora aite iwi which means with your contribution and my contribution the community will thrive. Thank you for your time. Te rei te whānau, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena kato kato. Okay, so I dropped my mic so I'm just going to try to put this back on without making too much noise. Is that okay? Can we still... Okay, thank you so much. So how can you help? Please help. Proposals are welcome. We have opened up we've set up our first term of next year and if you go to this URL GitHub.com if you read the rest of it we have set up the 2301 March through May generally speaking so this is for the LFX mentorship program the proposals session opens on January 16th I believe but because this is the one that we run we are happy to be a little bit flexible so if a project has a proposal that they want to suggest earlier than that I'm not going to turn it away so the other efforts that we're currently looking at currently our GitHub repo is oh there's a lot there so we're looking at cleaning that up and making sure that it is something that we can send folks to and immediately have it be obvious what the next step should be whichever programs that they're looking to do we are also looking for help on advisory documentation if you are a writer or if you are somebody who is an experienced mentor we'd like to have a discussion about what makes a good mentor, what makes a good proposal what makes a good mentorship experience we'd also like to potentially consider mentoring review and pairing mentors to help each other in the mentorship process and there's quite a few other things that we're looking for potentially an opportunities board where folks can look for projects we're looking for help that is maybe a little bit longer than just a mentorship term but come chat with us if you've got an interesting mentorship we'd be very very happy to see you and how to see us again CNCF mentoring repo is the prime repo for us there's a discussions board there that I'm really encouraging folks to use we have a lot of newcomers in asking questions about how to get started and such like that and that's where I also make announcements about upcoming programs and deadlines and have discussions about what to do next if you're on the CNCN Slack join us at tag contributor strategy channel and that's where we are doing most of our discussion around the planning for this we also have monthly meetings and those are currently actually running twice a month while we're in our start up phase here but they'll be paired back down to every second Tuesday of the month at 8pm UTC and if you've got a picture then you can that link is a bit of a mouthful so I also wanted to try and keep this short short talk because I wanted to ask you I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to ask questions this is a new program I'm very curious what your thoughts are what your questions are Brad if you could maybe check the online as well and see if we've got the online nothing online okay well does anybody in the room have a question well please Brad so I was mentoring the GSoc this year one thing I found is that the student word is used a lot and I feel like it puts a lot of let's say if you're doing a career change or you're not a student but you still want to be a beginner and start contributing is there any strategy to make it easier for people that aren't just a student as well so I understand you're going to repeat what I think you asked asking about folks who are who are maybe early in their career who are at a point in their career where they're just starting in tech and are interested in joining that's a very good question for instance the Google summer of code project is very specifically for people who are new to open source but the LFX program in contrast to that has got quite a bit wider intake process and so we don't in the LFX mentorship program we don't have any rules about age or student status or anything along those lines so if somebody is starting a new career or is interested for some other reason to be a part of the community those those mentees are certainly welcome and again the process for application would be very very similar because again we don't tend to look at life state when we're looking for mentees anyone else have it maybe I give a oh we have a microphone this stage is quite squeaky yeah I think you may have already answered my question with the last answer it sounds like there would be a place for folks that are you know maybe they're already in the tech industry they've been around for a while but they've worked in a company that's like primarily closed source and they're trying to get more involved upstream because it sounds like there's a place for mentees like that yeah absolutely if somebody is changing career or if they're becoming interested in open source it's a different for sure and again I don't think that there are any rules around age in the LFX mentorship program and that speaks to our um desire to have a more diverse intake we're looking for for people of all types I think Josh may have an answer or a question for him I'm Josh Berkus I'm a tag contributor strategy co-chair and I've also been both an LFX and an Outreachy mentor the for people looking for career change both LFX and Outreachy are very open to that Outreachy specifically is looking for women who are having a career change such as Intatec it's a very common profile for an Outreachy mentee although for people who are not students one of the things we really look at is availability because obviously if somebody is having a career change is the question of hey are you actually going to be able to finish a seven week mentorship thing which is maybe not full time but certainly at least 15 20 hours a week that's a good point yes I think again though there's opportunities for potentially longer internships as well I actually encourage folks who are applying to be mentees to look and try to start contributing if there's a good first issue there's nothing stopping somebody applying to be a mentee on a project to start contributing even before they've applied or as a part of the application process it's a very good way for mentees to start developing a rapport with the maintainers who might be looking for help we have another question I'm looking from a mentee perspective so to apply to the LFX mentorship program when we propose a project over there do we need to have mentors available is that how the process works so for the LFX mentorship program in order to propose a project the project needs to have a maintainer involved somehow and you can have multiple mentors because we don't want to necessarily burden maintainers with a lot of extra work so what will often happen is we'll have two or three people as mentors with one maintainer as sort of the coach so there is a requirement that a maintainer is a part of the process but they don't necessarily have to be the primary mentor and so if you're working on a project and you have an idea for a mentorship project but you are a maintainer then I recommend speaking to your project's maintainer so that we can start the process of application does that answer the question thank you how are we doing on time Brad we've got a couple more minutes if we have anybody else has a question otherwise we can give you three minutes back Josh I wanted to make another comment for this Nate mentioned this earlier but right now we've been starting with the primarily student new career mentorship programs like telefacts, outreach, et cetera but the plan is to as we have volunteer effort available expand this into helping projects with doing other types of mentorship such as mentoring somebody who knows how to program already they're just the first time contributor to your project right and they need to know how to get contributions into your project which is a standard kind of mentorship but most projects don't have anything set up other than you know hop on slack and ask questions which doesn't work for everybody who wants to join your project the so the plan is to actually look at not just you know the new contributor and the paid mentorships but to move into other forms of mentorship the projects need and you know for anybody who's listening if that's an interesting area for you and an area where you know something about mentorships in general we could really use more people in the working group to kick that off and to get you know sort of train them mentor the mentors going thank you for that that's a very good point so any other any other questions before I close this up no thank you all for coming I really appreciate it have a good rest of your cubes on okay