Mentorship Management Improvements (Epic)

[rickr]

Key stakeholder: @jjhampton

Pain points from our discussion on 10/5/2017 around mentor management:

• Assigning new mentees to a mentor in a timely fashion:
  • Goal is for a mentee to have a response from a mentor within 24-48 hours, once a mentor service request is made.
  • To notify mentors of a request, we currently rely on:
    • Slackbot that posts one-time to the #mentors-internal channel when a request is made. This requires mentors to actively monitor the #mentors-internal channel.
    • Volunteers who manually scan the Airtable sheet on a semi-regular basis to see if there are outstanding requests.
  • The above options are not ideal. They open the possibility for requests to slip through the cracks and go unfulfilled. (this has happened before)
• Monitoring the state/progress of the mentor/mentee experience:
  • How can we easily track when a mentor service request is fulfilled? Currently we rely on mentors manually entering this data on Airtables, which rarely happens.
  • How can we track the progress of mentees in a quantifiable way? We should aim to automate the gathering of data on:
    • How many mentees we've helped?
    • Which mentees have progressed to a new level of expertise?
• Track active mentors:
  • Our Airtable sheet currently lists 82 people who have signed up as mentors. In order for our volunteers to easily match incoming mentees -> mentors, we need to be able to filter this list to identify which of these are active mentors that have capacity / willingness to help mentees.

[jjhampton]

Proposal: Move Mentorship Management to Discourse (shelved, 10/5/2017)

• # form on front-end would hit the back-end API, posting a new topic to a -private- (mentors only) Discourse category. Note that the current form's interface w/ Airtables is broken: Request Mentor Button operationcode_frontend#341
• We can use Discourse sub categories and tags to manage state, instead of tracking a Mentor Request's state in a spreadsheet of cells where users are entering inconsistent data
• We can get richer notifications via the Slack to Discourse bot
• We can use tags for state (whether a request is fulfilled, whether mentee has been contacted, whether a follow-on mentor request is recommented, etc)
• We can use forum posts for updates (mentors could post notes about how a session went, how a mentee is progressing, etc.)
• Tag intersections can be used to visualize data (https://community.operationcode.org/tags/intersection/beginners/newbies) or simply return JSON for us to use elsewhere:
  (https://community.operationcode.org/tags/intersection/beginners/newbies.json)
• With Discourse, we track the last time a mentor/mentee has logged in. This will help track mentors and keep us connected with those who actually are committed to helping out.

[jjhampton]

Proposal: Improve Slack tooling, utilize OC web app, keep Airtable for data storage
Suggestions from @kylemh from phone discussion on 10/5/2017:

Assigning new mentees to a mentor in a timely fashion:
Assign the mentee to the mentor:
Use previous Mentor Request Form (temporarily not in use, see front-end issue 341 and back-end issue 155).
Mentors API (with small schema) and an interface on the front-end lists selectable mentors. When form submitted, pre-populates Airtables form.

Notifying mentors:
If mentee chose no mentor preference, all mentors with the desired skills are DMed. First claim gets it. If mentee chose a specific mentor, DM that mentor with the request record and the easy option to confirm deny. Maybe even to create an event on their device?
(expanded on this in OperationCode/operationcode_bot#89 in Slackbot repo)

Monitoring the state/progress of the mentor/mentee experience:
Bot that pings mentor based upon Mentorship event date. "It's been a week since your scheduled mentorship event with Billy Bob. How'd it go? FEEDBACK LINK HERE"

Track active mentors:
Multiple options

1. Dont track. Have Slack bot hit every mentor, but they can opt-out at any moment. Bi-annually remind mentors that they've opted-out to try to bring them back in.
2. Use Slack data to identify active mentors

[Hiren-Mehta]

We will also need to make the mentorship request form accessible only to eligible mentees.