Mentoring in Open Source Communities

Here's an article on mentoring that I thought some readers of perlmonks would find useful.

Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn't?

Quote from the opening page:

I asked people from several open source communities to share their mentoring experiences. In this article you'll learn what works, what doesn't, and how to encourage these relationships.

In talking here about mentoring, I make a distinction between "learn on your own" (such as examining the changes others make to the code you contributed) and somebody offering specific, individual advice (e.g. "It might run faster if you did this..."), particularly in an ongoing personal relationship. For more on mentoring in general, see my older article, The Executive Woman's Guide to Mentoring.

In the past few months I've observed & experienced many helpful interactions here at perlmonks. Thanks to all those who make new & inexperienced members to feel welcome; and to those new members who jump right in with questions and responses.

Some related nodes and pages:

Making assessments,
q: is there a new user thread to add comments to?,
OT: A Volunteer's Lament, and
Where are the Novice Mentoring Opportunities?

Comment on Mentoring in Open Source Communities

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Re: Mentoring in Open Source Communities
by BioLion (Curate) on Oct 21, 2009 at 10:29 UTC

Maybe a little off-the-mark, but from the rec(?:ei)|(?:ie)ving end, i think i benefitted most not from 'case study' type advice ( like "it would go faster if..." or "learn your own" ), but from advice that gave me the independence to trouble-shoot and experiment myself, at which point i could then return with questions like "how can i make this faster?" or "How would you do this differently?".

By this is mean being shown how to properly read error messages and warnings, using perldoc and cpan effectively, and the debugger. As well as other community resources like perlmongers ( and the Monastery of course! ), which give you the ability to tap into and see what other people are doing and how they do it, but i guess that comes back to the "learn your own" part, where you start to read|analyse|get inspiration from other peoples code...

I guess it is a very personal thing and everyone goes about the learning process differently, which is what makes mentoring so difficult, but at least for me, being given that independence to experiment ( and the tools to test those experiments ( can you tell i am a scientist...) ) was the biggest catalyst.

Though now i think about it, I think i also value having places i can go for help when my experimenting doesn't pay off, or when i just want to run an idea past people, so i guess it is a balance between giving your tutee freedom, whilst remaining a ( trusted ) presence.

Just a something something...

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