Season of Docs/Mentors

If you are considering to become a mentor for the Google Season of Docs program, learn more below.

Before the program

 * 1) Read the Season of Docs mentors manual to get an overview of your responsibilities.
 * 2) Add your project idea to Season of Docs/2020 and/or add a #Google-Season-Of-Docs-20XX tag to a project on Phabricator that you would like to mentor.
 * 3) Accept the invitation in the email sent by Google to become an official mentor.
 * 4) Talk to interested candidates. Share with them project details, goals and some ideas for implementation.
 * 5) Point them to self-contained, easy and newcomer-friendly tasks to work on.
 * 6) Allow all potential candidates to submit proposals for the project until the official deadline.
 * 7) Review proposals on Phabricator and give feedback.
 * 8) Assess proposals by following the selection process tips indicated below.
 * 9) Inform organization administrator about your decision.

During the program

 * 1) Set doc-development & communication plans with your mentee.
 * 2) Encourage them to participate in the community bonding period following our guidelines.
 * 3) Set aside time in your schedule for a weekly meeting with your mentee via video call.
 * 4) Aim to get a Minimum viable product (MVP) out the door. Fine-tune plans as needed.
 * 5) Stay in close communication with your mentee.
 * 6) Require your mentee to submit new drafts for review often, ideally every alternate day.
 * 7) Require your mentee to submit weekly reports.
 * 8) Submit timely project evaluations to organization administrators.
 * 9) Before the program ends, make sure to file known bugs or merge left over docs.

After the program

 * 1) Share your conclusions of the project in communication channels, wherever appropriate.
 * 2) Suggest or help with any improvements of our outreach program guides.
 * 3) Communicate to organization administrators any lessons learned.
 * 4) Recommend next steps to your mentee in the current project or wherever you think they might fit in our community.

Selection Process Tips

 * 1) Seek long-term contributors, not just new features. It probably takes more time to mentor a project than to complete it yourself.
 * 2) Choose the best candidate, not the one that arrived first.
 * 3) Don't choose a candidate based only on a convincing proposal and past experiences. They must complete our recommended program guidelines.
 * 4) Be transparent in your communications with contributors and treat them all fairly.
 * 5) Don't share any information about final results with your candidates before the official announcements. This also means:
 * 6) * Do not assign a specific Phabricator project, or its dependencies to any potential candidates before the official announcement.
 * 7) * Don't make up your mind on a candidate before the submission deadline. Allow all potential candidates to submit proposals for the project until the official deadline.
 * 8) Do not share a single project idea between two candidates. Try breaking it up into individual non-overlapping modules for better evaluation of individual efforts.
 * 9) Look for feedback and endorsements on the proposal from the community members.
 * 10) It's recommended to interview your candidate via an online medium.
 * 11) Ensure that participant would be able to put the number of hours as expected of them from the outreach program.
 * 12) Score your mentee and report to the organization admins. You could use the system below to rank them on a 1-5 scale (adapted from the Outreachy program):
 * 13) * 5 = amazing applicant, made extensive contributions of high quality
 * 14) * 4 = strong applicant, will certainly do a good job, made substantial contributions of high quality
 * 15) * 3 = good applicant, but is somewhat inexperienced
 * 16) * 2 = is unlikely to do a good job
 * 17) * 1 = not a good candidate
 * 18) * Additional free software experience indicator(s)
 * 19) ** + = enthusiast based on past actions (e.g. has a blog, has been to conferences, has an active GitHub account, or contributed to free software for some time)
 * 20) ** 0 = proficient user of free software
 * 21) ** - = no experience or very new to free software