SecurityEngineering/Jan2013WorkWeek/06-Mentorships

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1/16 at 11:15 am

Session Lead: Yvan Boily

Overview of the Mentorship program and discussion of how we can work with Yvan to maximize its' benefit for all of us.

Vidyo Recording

See: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Mentorship

todd joined to talk about the mentorship stuff he's doing!

This program will fill the gap between people who want to get involved with security and those who want to get paid by Mozilla (contractors, interns, full time, etc). Something more formal that allows us to establish a level of trust and share sensitive information with them so they can help us out.

Over the last year, yvan and mark have socialized and identified how to proceed with this. Last august, BCIT and UBC expressed an interest in a formal mentorship program with us.

Goal of the current program trajectory is to expand out and flesh out the mentorship program outside of security.

Biggest challenge yvan has seen is finding projects that are mentorship-sized. Ugh. Might be easier to engineering teams to chop off a bite-sized chunk. Mentorships can be for undergrad and grad students (depends on the project). Mainly want to find people interested in learning (so they may not even be students).

Academic connections are valuable (and easy to justify the work when it is novel), but not the sole target.

Looking for coordinators -- need to identify someone as a central point of contact for matchmaking on our team if we want to do a whole lot of teams. Want to distribute the intake process.

Mentees should be treated like a team member, but with very light-touch management (they should be mostly self-directed). Coordination of seceng mentees can be done by yvan for now, but we may need a coordinator if we end up with a bunch. Don't file bugs with the mentorship tags unless we're willing to mentor them.

Thoughts:

  • Tanvi is launching a mentorship with students in Finland. Trading credit for work.  :) We should have a list of stuff people can do that we can have ready for interested students.
  • yvan is working on a web interface for connecting students and projects (and open badges compensation for folks who help out or participate).

Action Items

  • [sid] set up brainstorm session for projects.