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Mentor Working Group Meeting - 3 Apr 2025

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 10 April 2025, about 1 month ago

Meeting Minutes

The Mentoring Working Group (MWG) charter has been formally accepted.
We are focusing on our immediate needs in this meeting.

In Attendance

  • Tim Lehnen 'hestenet'
  • Rachel Lawson 'rachel_norfolk'
  • Chris Darke 'ChrisDarke42'
  • Matthew Radcliffe 'mradcliffe'

DrupalCon Timeline Documents

  • Chris is working on three timeline documents:
    • DrupalCon planning: schedule prior to the conference
    • DrupalCon event: schedule during the conference
    • DrupalCon feedback: schedule after the conference
  • This is driven the DrupalCon steering committee.
  • Updates to documents need to end up in Meghan's “Event Bible” and Kuoni's equivalent.
  • We recognize that this information has existed in various formats, but legacy knowledge is required to remember where it is.

Document Store

  • Chris brought up the many places that we store Mentoring documentation: google drive, DA google drive, drupal.org as well as difficulty of finding both information for those searching for a mentor and those searching for mentoring documentation.
    • Tim mentioned a growing precedent for user-facing documentation to be available on drupal.org and internal documentation to livew on GitLab via GitLab pages.
    • There was shared enthusiasm about GitLab pages for internal documentation and linking to those from existing drupal.org documentation pages.

Mentoring Working Group Initial Plan

  • Our charter and the initial MWG is to get us started so that we can figure out membership and terms next.
  • We need to set a date to have governance finalized.
    • Tim suggests after Vienna 2025 and we use this time to see what works, gather feedback from Core Mentoring Coordinators (CMC).

Communications and Decisions

  • Question was asked — At what point does everyone involved make a decision? Entire mentoring team? CMCs? MWG?
  • Tim recommends this should default to coordinators. And all mentors act in an advisory role to keep communication open, but not blocked. Similar to other working groups.
  • Requests for feedback asked in Mentoring Meta and in issue queue.
    • Mention of Cunningham's Law essentially “correct us when something is wrong”
  • Models for order of operations (all apply)
    1. Pose question/decision to gather feedback back to CMCs and MWG.
    2. MWG proposes to CMCs and then to Mentoring team.
    3. MWG makes quick decision followed by feedback and revision.
  • We change to making decisions by consent rather than by unanimous consensus.
  • Matthew has tried to be completely open to the mentoring team about almost everything and every procedure by creating issues and adding to the Mentoring meta agenda.

Mentoring Working Group Membership

  • Tim mentioned the recommendation in moving in the direction of renewable terms with affirmative consent of the person and affirmative consent of coordinators.
  • We should have a way to trigger a roll-off of responsibility.
  • Rachel: We recognize that in reality the people who are doing things and turning up are the the ones filling these roles.
  • Biggest risk: to busy to figure out how to get help or train/mentor someone before burn out.
  • We should consider a dedicated "second" for each member and improve mentoring mentors into our process.
  • This will help with having access to materials, system accounts.
  • Regarding choosing people to add as CMCs:
    • The "one" big issue has been problematic to review.
    • Once we have our governance by-laws we can read them, make the decision as the ones to be accountable for it, and then do it, RTBC it, and update the prior maintainers list.
  • We need to work on identifying our strengths as CMCs.
    • CMCs have many roles, but we should not feel need to do all the roles.
    • Rachel: This provides a mentoring opportunity to learn a new role
    • Matthew: Our coordinator role page needs work (there's an issue for that)
    • Tim: scheduling and reminders are important for updating documentation. Automation helps.

Mentoring Working Group By-Laws

Our by-laws are the operating rules/procedures that are not in the charter and provide an easier way to change those procedures.

  • Tim mentioned a working group that has a good example, but could not remember which one. Maybe the Community Working Group (CWG)?
  • By-law suggestions:
    1. List out the difficult decisions that we have had to make as CMCs.
    2. Come up with the procedures to handle these decisions.

Miscellaneous

  • Tim: if you need official working group association accounts, official drive, or something else, please ask Tim.
  • Chris asked about handling difficult decision during DrupalCon. This was discussed, but nothing proposed.
  • Perhaps a shared calendar for CMCs to know about each other's schedules.
  • Individual channel managers for Mentoring coordinators/leads and mentoring team Slack channels.
  • We talked about the Drupal Contribution web site, Member Platform, and automating calendar reminders for contribution events and needing to do something.

Action and Future Discussion Items

  • Matthew to post minutes to Mentoring issue queue.
  • Meetings:
    • We will meet weekly until we are situated to meet every other week for the initial MWG.
    • The current time works for everyone (Thursdays at 17:00 UTC)
    • Tim will setup a reusable zoom link.
  • The Mentoring Meta is next week (Wednesday, 9 Apr 2025 20:00 UTC) with an agenda.
  • Proposals for document store.
  • Proposals for by-laws and policies.
📌 Task
Status

Fixed

Component

Meeting

Created by

🇺🇸United States mradcliffe USA

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