Joomla will be at the Grace Hopper Conference - join us!

[RCheesley]

Forum post to discuss this blog post http://community.joomla.org/blogs/commu ... in-us.html

[Hils]

To facilitate this, we are currently recruiting mentors who would be willing to assist with bringing new volunteers on board, helping them find their feet in the community, putting them in touch with the right teams, and supporting them in the early days of their Joomla journey.

This is a really good plan and according to Twitter, you have both achieved a large number of new volunteer signups - well done!

This is the way I was brought into our Community and something I have continued to do myself.

What does concern me though is what are we bringing people to? Do we actually know? I don't know the new proposed structure of Joomla. I don't see a list of Working Groups to direct people to. I don't actually know anyone who has a complete overview of our project.

So what precisely do you want these Mentors to do? Do you want specific types of Mentors? Code Mentors? or?

To repeat: this is an excellent initiative but I am not sure the Mentoring system has been thoroughly worked out and is available now. This does concern me as we have tried and failed at this before - notably over 100 coders gathered, trained and committed to many hours of work on the Bug Squad in 2010. Hence my genuine concern that we have a Mentor structure in place, ready to go, and not just a list of good people who would like to 'give it a go'.

[RCheesley]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Hils, and yes we did have a really great response not only in people who completed the form on the landing page, but also being able to speak with people, talk about Joomla, re-ignite an interest in some who used it a long time ago, and even spark interest in academics and faculty staff who are considering using Joomla within their courses. It was truly an incredible experience to attend the conference.

Both Sarah and myself felt it was a really significant event to attend on behalf of the project, it certainly raised peoples' awareness of Joomla as a CMS, and of the opportunities that are presented by open source, and specifically those available in our community.

To respond to your specific questions about mentoring and what are we bringing people to - we're bringing them to our community. We're also bringing them to our code, our documentation, our marketing team, our social team, in fact, any area of the project that they might be interested in getting involved with.

The people we spoke to were extremely diverse in their interests, experience level, time available and skills. Our community is just as diverse.

The first step with these people will be to communicate directly with a small number of people to find out exactly what their interests are - as you will notice the landing page is purposely very brief, it doesn't really give us much information about the person, certainly not enough to know where they might be interested in contributing or how that might work.

Once these initial conversations have been had, our team will then put those individuals in touch with the most appropriate mentor in whatever area of the project they want to work on. We've had very broad offers of help - for example 'I'll help people get started with testing bugs' through to very specific topics like 'I'll help someone interested in unit testing get to grips with how Joomla does it'.

For this reason, we need a wide range of mentors in every area of our project that we have contributors. Ideally with enough time to support at least one person, but that support may not be ongoing for a huge amount of time - it might well be enough just to get someone going and be there if they need help making their first pull request or getting them involved in their first marketing campaign.

You're right, Hils, it hasn't been 'thoroughly worked out' in intricate detail - I worked with the resources available to me in the limited time frame, during which we were also organising a huge amount of surrounding projects that were needed.

We worked to the best of our abilities to put something together, which would enable us to bring people expressing an interest into the project - I'm absolutely open to suggestions for improvement, and as I have said before, open to mentors who would like to be involved - it would be great if you'd consider signing up as a mentor!

I'm also keen to learn from past experiences from those involved, so please do feel free to drop me an email with the relevant contacts as I'm sure we could learn a lot from previous attempts.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond and to voice your concerns,

Ruth

[jessicadunbar]

It is an effective way of helping new contributors to progress in Joomla.
A mentor is a guide who can help the mentee to find the right direction or issues that need help with in the project. I signed up as a mentors because I've had similar experiences in getting involved with Joomla. I didn't know how to contribute or how to get involved.