Problem Statement

Mentoring is a big part of the GV experience in both informal and formal ways. When an editor orients a new author, that's a form or mentoring, as it is when GVers act as mentors as part of formal mentoring partnerships with external organisations. Let's examine the learning we've gathered from these experiences and figure out what works well and what doesn't.

Desired Outcomes

To examine and assess the learning we've gathered from our various mentoring experiences and develop a process for mentoring in both internal and external situations, along with a user-friendly mentoring manual

The manual is intended to help mentors and mentees (internal as well as external mentoring partnerships) communicate effectively and share better strategies for producing better posts and to disseminate them much more effectively.

Conclusions Reached

The first round of discussions helped identify some of the challenges faced by both mentors as well as mentees. Apart from the working group members, we also reached out to some of the other editors, mentors and mentees – including some of our external mentoring project partners.

Then we shifted the discussion to Trello and used a handy combination of mail and Trello to generate and work on emerging ideas and mentoring guidelines.

Finally all the ideas were put forward in a draft report. This was shared with the community, for further inputs and development.

Next steps

The draft report can be accessed here

This is an initial set of guidelines. Can be fine-tuned as per the mentoring situation and also can be enriched with further inputs from the community.

Submitted by: Aparna Ray