The Future of Mentoring

Drupal Core Mentoring has exploded since the idea of office hours first came about in July 2011. Mentoring at events came on the scene at DrupalCon Denver and DrupalCon Munich in 2012, then in Sydney in early 2013. Every DrupalCon since then has included Core Mentored Sprints and First Time Sprinter Workshops to ease new contributors into the Drupal contribution workflow.

In this session we will review the history of how Drupal mentoring has existed in the past and how it has changed since then, including ongoing core mentoring office hours taking place online. We will present a few points which represent a vision for the future of mentoring, with links to existing issues to help implement them where applicable.

Vision:

• contribution process is more transparent, and mentors do not spend most of their time explaining drupal.org and drupal.org work arounds.
• mentors actually do real mentoring
• becoming a mentor is easy to do
• experienced mentors return to do mentoring at events

Measures of successful mentoring:

• number of people attending mentored events (IRC, DrupalCon mentored sprints)
• new contributor experience
• percentage of new contributors that become repeat contributors

Then, we will talk about the barriers to realizing the vision. And, we will finish with some actionable steps that will get us closer to that vision.

Presenters will include people with experience with different aspects of mentoring: in person at small events, in IRC office hours, in the issue queues, and at DrupalCons.