Creating a Culture of Mentorship - Event Notes

[Meredith Noble]

Hi all,

I captured all of the notes that people contributed during our last
event (thank you for all of your contributions!). We'd encourage
anyone and everyone in the UX community to take an idea and run with
it! We're happy to promote anyone's activities here on the IxDA
announcement list, and on our Twitter account.

Matt and I are planning to take the speed dating idea and turn it into
an event in late June. This will be external to "IxDA" -- just a
community event. If anyone would like to help us out with it, let us
know! We're are mat...@gmail.com and mer...@gmail.com. Watch for more
details and a date very soon, and start thinking if you'd like to
participate either as a potential mentee or a potential mentor.

Let's keep this ball rolling!

Meredith & Matt

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What People Want - Mentees
======================
- Something better than osmosis
- Cross-disciplinary exposure
- P2P knowledge sharing, Expert knowledge sharing
- Mentor has been places I have not (and has perspective)
- Best practices
- Skill exchange
- An anchor
- Validation
- Safety to screw up (safety net)
- Complementary relationship
- Help with career path
- Informal (not internships)
- Regular structure
- Help finding people
- Brand / company agnostic
- Agreement / exit strategy
- Toolkit
- 1 to 1, many to many, 1 to many
- Support for mentors and mentees
- Career changers
- Multiple roles – to try on
- Being a mentor for one day (not sure what this meant –
anyone?)
- Hands-on (working on a project)
- Common expectation about time and commitment level, content
- Perhaps “niche” mentors, each to help with a different
aspect of one’s career & interests

What People Want – Mentors
======================
- See people succeed
- Learn new things
- Long-term connections
- Crystallization of knowledge through teaching
- Community recognition (?)


How a Community Could Support
========================
- Twitter group
- A way to start conversations with people you don’t know
- Reaching out to students and other feeder groups
- Open House
- Networking, offline and online
- Peer presentations (less formal & less intimidating)

Events / Programs
==============
- Design competition / community design project / OSS project
(outside your company)
- Networking dinner
- Brainstorm & discuss (thinktank)
- Speaker series
- Speed dating (with some structured questions to help people
start)
- Online forum
- Match maker site
- Expert panel of mentors (public mentoring)
- “Advisory panel”
- Mentor skills assessment – survey for a mentor for
“placement” into a program
- Known community experts