Mentorship guidance and onboarding sections in the website

[ArthurSens]

The Prometheus organization has participated in several seasons of LFX Mentorship and Google Summer of Code with the help of CNCF. This is awesome 🙂, it's a chance for passionate people to finally have an impact in the industry, it's a chance to integrate new community members into the team and more hands to keep the Prometheus organization ticking.

After participating a few times in those programs, both as the mentee and as the mentor, I think we could improve the Mentor<->Mentees interactions by having guidelines on our website:

Mentor application guidelines

Explanations of the different mentorship programs, how to come up with and propose project ideas, what to expect from mentees, advice on how to conduct a successful mentorship, document who is eligible to be a mentor, etc.

Mentee application guidelines

With Prometheus-Operator participating in Google Summer of Code this year, we are very satisfied with how our applications came up. We came up with clear application guidelines so that we could redirect all candidates to it. As a result, we had several excellent project proposals.

I assume projects from the Prometheus organization are much broader in scope and may require very different prerequisites from the mentees given the size of the organization and how diverse our community is in terms of technology. We can think of different ways to write down those guidelines, maybe we can write something that fits all, or maybe mentors should write their prerequisites when proposing a new project idea, but certainly, clear guidance will help a lot during the proposal periods.

Onboarding guideline

Since @bwplotka has been one of the main facilitators in mentorship programs in the last couple of years in the Prometheus ecosystem, there is an onboarding guideline on Thanos's website that is used to onboard both Thanos and Prometheus mentees. The onboarding guideline is getting out-of-date for Prometheus mentees, and it doesn't make much sense that this onboarding guideline lives on Thanos' website.

We should move it to our website while updating it with up-to-date information.

[bwplotka]

👍 as discussed with Arthur, let's do it, great idea.

Perhaps now would be a good moment as we start various mentorships.

[ArthurSens]

Hmmmm, I was looking at this today @bwplotka and got a bit stuck finding a good place for it on the website.

If we put this under "Community", it will easily take almost the whole page with information that might not be relevant for people who just want to join meetings and find communication channels.

Should we add a new tab called mentorships?

[mohamedawnallah]

Great initiatives, @ArthurSens and @bwplotka!

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this, but I'm very curious to know if Prometheus will apply for LFX Mentorship Q3-Q4 2024? Any updates would be appreciated!

Looking forward to it! 🙏

[ArthurSens]

I haven't seen any discussion about new mentorship projects for now @mohamedawnallah

To be completely honest I think there's room for improvement in how our organization interacts with GSoC and LFX, many members aren't aware of the process, or how to organize and conduct a mentorship program. One of my goals with this webpage is to improve the process for both Prometheus contributors who want to be mentors and for candidates who want to become a mentee. Let's see how things go once I find time to work on this again :)

But as usual, any updates we have about mentorships will eventually end up in https://github.com/cncf/mentoring, I'd recommend following that repository for now :)