Please feel free to branch and suggest pull edits to the owners ^^ so we can continue to improve the communities event checklists.
The 'Mentors Wrangler' is one of the most important jobs of the Hackathon. Your job = recruit a mentor team! It is the mentors you recruit who will roam the halls of the hackathon being the "substitute team player" which any team may call upon for help! All hackathon teams will falter at some point and it is the mentor who must come to their rescue. As the wrangler (aka gatherer/shepherd) of the mentors, you must find and know the skills of many great technicians, from: AppDev, DevOpps, SysAdmin, UX, Pitch Artists, User Testers, Technical integrators, and anyone else who likes apps! Ideally you can recruit at least 1 mentor for every two teams across a diversity of skills.
Your objectives as the 'Mentor Wrangler' (if you so choose to accept them...[1]):
- Recruit, befriend, empower and entice any known "super tech talent" to come and volunteer their time as a mentor. Hint: the best hackers at the event should be mentors, not participants ;-)
- Inspire mentors as to why sharing their knowledge and skills is an amazing and truly good thing to do.
- Make the hackathon a game for your mentors so they enjoy the event and want to help your community grow.
The below checklists are intended to provide the minimum viable set of tasks which will need to be completed for the hackathon. Naturally, you will add on additional tasks yourself and we would highly encourage you to create your own checklists and share them back with the community[1]. See the bottom of this page for examples from other hackathons.
Are you ready to help birth a new world of community based cross-cloud apps...? Of course you are, this hackathon is going to make memories!
Things to get done prior to the hackathon beginning:
- Create a guide for mentors which explains the role (objectives, responsibilities and some mentoring tips!) and what they will be expected to do, before, during and after the event (see examples at the bottom of this page).
- Visit local tech communities to promote the hackathon and talk with their leaders to identity the best community hackers and invite them to participate in the hackathon as mentors or trainers.
- Recruit mentors for a wide range of skills diversity (AppDev, DevOpps, UX, SysAdmin, CEO, Marketing, etc.). Have mentors who are going to attend the event in person (80%) and also mentors who will be available online (20%).
- Have mentors create a profile for what kinds of things they can help do, enable them to share this profile with the other event organizers and participants before the event.
- Work with the "Training Sensei" to prepare trainings, encourage mentors to give trainings to show off their skills and how they will be able to help teams perform.
- Prepare the shift schedule with the checkpoints to accomplish. The Hackathon will be divided in checkpoints to ensure that the teams are making progress during the tight schedule.
- Work with the "Judges Chair" to decide how mentors will become advocates to help during the judging process.
- Create a roster, schedule and presentation for when people will be mentoring, don't expect them to work the whole time. Provide shifts and make sure they get to enjoy the fun, food and frivolity of the event as well!
- Schedule a meet and greet with all the mentors so they can get to know each other before the event, have a little party for just the mentors to make them feel special and explain all the things!
- Reserve an area for mentors in the venue "Mentors Help Desk".
Tasks to achieve during the event:
- Agree a way to communicate with mentors throughout the event so you can keep everyone up to date as they work with different teams, i.e. a slack channel, twitter direct messages, etc.
- Register all the mentors as they arrive and give their welcome package (t-shirt, badge, etc).
- Before the opening ceremony bring together all the mentors to have a final Q&A session, review the shift schedule, judging criteria and take a great picture of the mentors crew.
- After the opening ceremony assign mentors with their teams.
- Once all the mentors meet their teams, your job is to be sure that everything is running smooth helping mentors to succeed with their mentorship.
- Monitor for bugs to feedback to wider OpenStack Dev + Opps community.
- "Mentors Focus Group" (desired): During the Hackathon (before the final pitches) you can lead a research study (~1hr duration) to hear about the experience of the mentors with their teams developing application for the cloud. The results could be published in the OpenStack community as takeaways to improve the development experience in OpenStack.
Tasks to achieve after the event:
- Liaise with the OpenStack Cloud App Hackathon Working Group (CloudAppHack-WG) to provide feedbacks for upcoming hackathons.
- Share your experience as mentor with the community (blogs, video or local meetups).
- Mentor the next hackathon mentors.
- Provide post-event feedback to the hackathon organizers.
- Example from Taipei... <-- Joanna
- Mentors Lead Guide (Guadalajara)
- Mentor’s Guide (Guadalajara)
- Example Mentor Profile Spreadsheet from Guadalajara Hackathon
- A mentor sharing his experience in the Guadalajara Hackathon.
- Do you want to talk with a "Mentor Wrangler"? Say hi to Marcela (@mbonell) on Twitter/IRC.
- Why use checklists? Humans are not great at remembering stuff, this is how mistakes happen, people forget things when they are in stressful situations (like events), checklists are great for focusing the mind and result in significant productivity gains. Read more about this in a book called, 'The Checklist Manifesto'.
Footnotes: [1] = These checklists are intentionally created in GitHub so you can take advantage of the GitHub versioning model which allows you to suggest edits and submit them back to the community for reuse. For instructions on how to branch and submit a pull request please see: https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/q