Landscape Design - Idea Validation phase I

On behalf of landscape group from Rails Girls CPH meet up, we came up with an idea of creating a google form to test the number of people who will be interested of being a mentor or mentee. Later, we will collect all the questions from mentors and mentee group and then create a questionaire form. Here are the summary from today's meetup.

Are you interested in Mentoring or Finding a mentor?

1. Mentors

• Skills - which programming language and which field do you work
• How long have you been in programming?
• Frequency - how often can you dedicate your time
• Offline/Online - A communication platform
• Availability
• What do you want to get out of it?
• What do you want to offer?
• Would you like to mentor more than one mentee at once?

2. Mentees

• In which coding language do you need help
• What are your expectation?
• How often do you need help?
• What kind of resources do are you looking for?
• Are you completely new or have some experience in programming?

We decided to distribute the questionnaires through some of the platforms below:

• Lightning talks in meetups
• Share the questionnaires in
  • Railsgirls Slack
  • Hack Your Future Slack
  • QR Code
  • Stickers

Mentor Group Notes

We discussed from a mentor's point of view what they would want in order to join the platform.

Why does one want to be a mentor?

To contribute to the community. Something a mentor would like to make sure that the mentee is motivated.

Things Mentors could offer/help with and how they plan to offer their help.

• Helping with job interviews, salary negotiations, motivation/encouragement.
• Code reviews on Git
• How do they want to work with coding challenges for example-- reviewing pull requests, and code review
• Telling how much time they have to offer-- for example as 1 hour / week. And/or for how long of a time period they would like to be a mentor-- for example for the period of 3 months or 6 months...

Somethings mentors might like on the platform:

• As a mentor, your might also want to invite other mentors.
• As a mentor you can search for what a mentee is looking for.
• As a mentor, can a mentee choose you or make a request to choose you?
• Or does a mentor pick a mentee through the platform.
• As a mentor, have the ability to set a maximum amount of mentees

A way to help keep a mentor motivated could be through some type of gamification with badges.

We just started to talk about what a Mentor's profile could include

1. Name
2. Company
3. Languages they work with and will help with
4. Available time.

Mentees Group Notes

We discussed from a mentee's point of view what they would want in order to join the platform.

Why does one want to be a mentee?

Two types of needs:

1. Code Advice
2. Career Advice The first type is language-specific and the second sin't necessarily. Suggestion for helping the mentee find the right person: tags for mentors. Tags could include 'code advice', 'JavaScript', 'career advice', helping the mentee find her match.

Taking care of welcoming total beginners

• Total beginners might not know what language to specialize in, so a way to welcome them could be to have the option of not having to specify that when you first ask to be a mentee.

A Mentee can also be a Mentor

• Broad consensus in the group that this should be a feature.