Mentorship Program Budget S1 Application

🏩 Budgets/Grants
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Mentorship Team Budget S1 Application

Authors; ntindle#1998, bluepanda#5982, Milo#7738, 7i7o#9634, bean.snr/#9339, lu.an#9388, piablo#5503

Supporting Budget Stewards: @Colin4ward, @kempsterrrr

Summary

This proposal is designed to appropriately compensate the mentors and organizing team of the mentorship program for their time and expertise. The Mentorship program is aimed to educate, coach and support our fellow D_D contributors, who are looking to grow & master new skills. Areas include web development, entrepreneurship, design, and more.

Motivation

The mentorship program’s goal is to educate and support web3 contributors. This requires three sets of people: mentees, who learn; mentors, who teach; and organizers, who facilitate. We hope to appropriately compensate the mentors and organizers for their time and expertise. We plan to compensate the mentees via the skills and knowledge they gain via the program.

Mission, values and goals alignment

The mentorship program is directly aligned with the goals, values, and mission of the DAO. The mentorship program directly seeks to educate the members that have been onboarded to the DAO and provide them a way to improve their skills in a structured and inclusive environment. We value growth, professional and intrapersonal development and the community engagement it brings. Build web3 with frens, onboard & educate them first! We think coaching our contributors is the best investment of the resources by far.

Brand usage

The Developer DAO Brand will be utilized within the Developer DAO Discord and Newsletter in regards to articles about the mentorship program. The D_D Brand may also be utilized to source skilled mentors and advisors for the program as it advances.

Scope of work

Teaching how to teach is key in the process - create a programme with best practices of mentoring, where mentors not only help mentees build on their knowledge, but also their skills in mentoring. This will create a positive feedback loop of new mentors, creating a sustainable initiative for the DAO. And hopefully a new culture in web3 development in general.

A dedicated private channel is set up as a safe space, in which mentors can collaborate and share best practices, and also support each other with any challenges. We hope this will also organically lead to meaningful workshops being offered within the programme, which can further improve mentorship quality and reinforce that feedback loop. This will be actively encouraged by core team members. If successful, any workshops could also filter out to serve the wider DAO.

Mentoring initiatives will be broken down in cohorts, each being 12 weeks long. Cohorts are tracked, reviewed and facilitated by the organization team.

Pre-program facilitation

  • Draft & post application form
  • Review applicants & evaluate their interests
  • Confirm participation over the email
  • Communicate the start date and guidelines

Early stages

  • Onboard first cohort
  • Run pilot before season 1 / full cohort starts
  • Review learning curve & engagement
  • Track the progress

Cohort

  • Have recurring 1:1 with mentors
  • Facilitate a meaningful and flourishing learning environment
  • Conduct monthly program quality audits to feed back to DAO
  • Act as an incident facilitators for unforeseen disturbances

Post-program evaluation

  • Conduct exit surveys of all mentors and mentees
  • Organize a demo day for those who used the time on the program to create a product/service
  • Gather basic metrics on engagement, attendance, drop-outs, operational efficiency (educating to fill out specific skill gaps in the community)
  • Evaluate ROI and success of the program (training cost per mentee)
  • Promote the program

Financial implications

There are multiple roles and interactions that will occur within the mentorship program. They are listed below. Each round of the mentorship program is 12 weeks and is to align with the start of each season. There will be a four week period of no mentorship, with the mentorship team meeting for two weeks during that period to refine the program.

  • Mentor: A member of D_D who takes on 1 or more mentees. The numbers below are calculated at 3 mentees/mentor with a max of 24 mentors and 72 mentees for the first round of the season. This is an hourly role.
  • Mentee: A member of D_D who is led by one mentor for at least 2 hours a week. The mentee is required to attend 90% of their mentoring sessions to retain their place in the program. Mentees are compensated by the education and skills they gain by participating in the program. This role is not compensated in $CODE.
  • Lead Organizer: The Champion of the mentorship program (currently ntindle). They are required to facilitate the mentorship program and overarching organization therein. This is a salaried role.
  • Additional Organizers: The additional organizers that help the mentorship program function. Their roles are fluid and are expected to become better defined within the first round of the mentorship program. Organizers take care of program facilitation & operations. This is a salaried role.
  • Quests for tasks: We haven’t discussed this in-depth within the team, so we open this question to the DAO for helping identify anything that you may feel is necessary or relevant. Since the programme is going to create contact with a large number of individuals, it makes it difficult to predict the types of resources within and without the programme that will help the initiative be more successful e.g. content research and creation, workshops provided from sources external to the team, quests outside of present organizer’s scope, or any other external factors/considerations,
  • Restoration of $CODE: $CODE comes from the treasury of our whole Developer_DAO and is not to be abused. $CODE which has not been correctly estimated, will be accounted for and rightfully restored to the DAO treasury.
Role Average hours/Week Weeks Hourly Rate Total per Person People in category Total $CODE
Mentor 2 12 15 360 24 8640
Mentee 4 12 0 0 72 0
Lead Organizer 8 14 15 1680 1 1680
Additional Organizers 6 14 15 1260 6 7560
Quests for tasks 5880
Totals 105 23760

Revenue split: There is not expected to be any revenue generated by this project. $CODE & effort is invested into the program to educate talent to benefit the community into the future.

Team

Team Member Role Description Weekly Hours (Full Season)
@ntindle#1998 Lead Organizer / Champion 8
@piablo#5503 Pedagogical support, mentor-mentee relational support, workshops co-liaison, internal communication 16
@Milo#7738 Mentor & Mentee coordination, substitute mentor, Program scaling & planning 8
@BluePanda#5982 Mentor Mentee Initial Coordinator, Coordination efforts 4-6
@7i7o#9634 Coordination efforts, User feedback, Mentor/Mentee support 6-8
@bean.snr/#9339 Coordinator, feedback and planning support 3-5
@lu.an#9388 additional organizer 1-2
@ropats16#1743 program scaling and planning support 2-3

Success Metrics & KPIs

After an extensive course of 12 weeks we expect mentees to feel comfortable within their topic & start contributing to the community. They will get exposure to a real working model of the product/skill in a given sector. Mentees, who are going for a hard skills/technical course will have an opportunity to build together with a mentor. If completed as intended, mentees, upon completion of the program, will get a demo day and have a chance to present to the broader community and potentially team up with other D_D contributors to scale the project. Those who have acquired the skill set to mentor and have the desire, can help to maintain the aforementioned feedback loop by providing mentorship in future cohorts

  • KPI: Mentor & mentee engagement

  • Engagement, recognition, relationship with mentees & mentors, time management & well-being are measured through 1:1 meetings with the organization team, entry & exit surveys.

  • Mentor retention

  • Number of mentors who are willing to further contribute in subsequent or future cohorts. Measured through exit surveys.

  • KPI: Diversity and inclusion

  • The most common methods of assessing diversity are measuring the representation of underrepresented groups at various levels of an organization e.g mentees & mentors.

VOTE

  • Yes, I support this application
  • No, I do not support this application

0 voters

11 Likes
2

A minor change, the number of listed additional organizers should be 7 by count of names listed. To account for the fix, we’ve reduced the amount in the quests category by the appropriate amount.

The updated table is below:

Role Average hours/Week Weeks Hourly Rate Total per Person People in category Total $CODE
Mentor 2 12 15 360 24 8640
Mentee 4 12 0 0 72 0
Lead Organizer 8 14 15 1680 1 1680
Additional Organizers 6 14 15 1260 7 8820
Quests for tasks 4620
Totals 105 23760
5 Likes
3

I think @Cannablitch is someone to touch base with at some point, as they’re currently in the midst of overhauling the Product Guild. Their immediate focus is generating a list of active projects across the DAO, with a long-term focus on how to best assist people with managing their projects.

3 Likes
4

so, will the community consider choosing some multilingual organizers , i think it is better for including some talent but not english native mentees

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Very good point @okfine.eth.
We asked in the application form ‘what is your preferred language for mentor/mentee?’
And we have about 10 languages in our core team.
What is the best way to use those extra languages?
Please, please, please give more details. :hugs:

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hahaha, i dont know man, but i think i will choose the mentor who speaks my native language. thanks you

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7

this is looking great folks, hugely valuable to the DAO. :handshake:

FYI the deadline for finalising the proposals is Sunday @ midnight UTC, is everything in here updated regarding the $CODE budget ask? seems to me folks are doing an awful lot of work so if now you’ve started you’re really doing more hours please up the rates to reflect that. better to over estimate than underestimate IMHO

if no changes please add “Supporting Budget Stewards: name, name, name” under authors and include any of the @stewards who’ve signalled support. If you make changes to the financials just @ me back here there can be a final check before it’s confirmed.

as it stands I’d be very happy to give my support as a budget steward too this. legends.

voting will kick off Monday :rocket:

@ntindle @BluePanda @Milo.io @luan @Piablo

3 Likes
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Hey @kempsterrrr can I add 6 hours a week on to my total weekly hours? That’s quite a modest estimation, based on this past number of weeks’ work. But of course the tasks aren’t necessarily going to be the same from now until the end of the season.

I just want the mentees and mentors to feel that there is the presence of a few team members throughout the period and that there is a steady connection to the rest of the DAO.

cc @7i7o and @ntindle

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9

That sounds reasonable to me

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Don’t see why not. @ntindle unsure if you’ve done this already but please go ahead and do so. Planning to elevate to votes this evening so any changes in before then!!

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cc @ntindle @Piablo I tried to make the adjustments myself but I couldn’t work them out. Have elevated to a vote but would you mind making the edit anyhow when you get this place

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12

I think this KPI is still pretty vague, so my suggestion is to run a retrospective towards the end of Season 1 - and see what lessons are needed to be learnt, as well as how you might better contextualize this in future seasons.

Throughout the course of S1, both myself and @vorcigernix (as part of the OKRs Initiative) will be checking in at intervals, to see how much progress is being made on reaching set KPIs, see how we can offer support etc. I imagine this can be better defined, as time goes on.

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That’s fantastic @luan and @vorcigernix . Enthusiastic about that collaboration and getting meaningful and sustainable outcomes! Ans let’s keep to a closer and not farther end of Season 1 :blush:

2 Likes
14

Hey guys! I think the 2/week avg for Mentors is not so realistic. Specially if the mentor is engaged and really trying to support and have a meaninfull impact on their mentees. That’d imply only 1 hr/week per mentee, that’s barely enough to help them debug something they’re stuck with :slight_smile:

As a mentor I wouldn’t mind earning less per hour as an organizer and I think most of us don’t do it for the $CODE. But increasing the number of hours would give a more realistic scenario that would primarily benefit the mentees. So instead of 2hr 15/hr , we could have something like 4hr 10/hr

15

For some general background, the 15/hr was set DAO wide.

For the time commitments, we did a few surveys of mentors and the median amount they could promise was 2hrs/mentor/week. I would love if more time was spent but realistically, for the first round of the mentorship program, I think we went with it just to have a number. We will learn over the next four months and I hope to improve it.

1 Like
16

I’ve put a proposal to the mentorship team to get their thoughts on asking for some pre-budget period retroactive rewards,
The aim for the mentorship programme was to have something ongoing. Strategically, we then made the choice to actually launch it so that it was ready for action on day 1 of season 1. We managed to do that way ahead of time. A lot of the heavy lifting for some of our team was during that pre-season, and therefore pre-budget launch period.
We are providing something special and sustainable for the DAO. It seems only right.

2 Likes
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Milestone Summary

  • KPI: Mentor & mentee engagement
    • Engagement, recognition, relationship with mentees & mentors, time management & well-being are measured through 1:1 meetings with the organization team, entry & exit surveys.
    • Mentor retention
    • Number of mentors who are willing to further contribute in subsequent or future cohorts. Measured through exit surveys.

This KPI isn’t easy to measure currently. We are working on tools with @myz1237.eth to help ease the process of reporting, which will unlock the data analysis potential. We are moving forward with the assumption that no news is good news.

  • KPI: Diversity and inclusion
    • The most common methods of assessing diversity are measuring the representation of underrepresented groups at various levels of an organization e.g mentees & mentors.

We didn’t collect diversity and inclusion data for season 1. We regret that it didn’t happen at the start of the season, but we plan on collecting that data at the end of the season. We plan on working with a few mentors and mentees and trying to boost content to help make the program more accessible to underrepresented groups.

“You’re looking for someone who looks like you” - @dev_jsarje

We are looking to help people do that. A few of the ideas are POAPs for S1 participants that they can share. Others include extended mentorships into season 2. We are actively investigating both.

The mentorship has been pretty successful, albeit smaller than we wanted.

2 Likes
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Re. Diversity and inclusion — this KPI was set prior to the start of Season 1. Who made the decision not to collect this data? And what was the rationale behind this decision?

Can you shed more light on this, please? The above quote is a little vague.

19

Re. Diversity and inclusion — this KPI was set prior to the start of Season 1. Who made the decision not to collect this data? And what was the rationale behind this decision?

It wasn’t really a decision to not collect it, more of that it just didn’t happen. Most of the pairings happened well before S1 and were done before this requirement was written. This idea kicked off in April and a significant portion of the work done was pre-KPIs.

There is still an opportunity to collect them at the end of the season closing survey.

Can you shed more light on this, please? The above quote is a little vague.

We want to help underrepresented groups show their involvement with the dao by issuing things like POAPS

20

Thanks for clarifying.

Does this include both mentors and mentees? Or just one of the groups? If the latter, what’s the rationale there?

And would these POAP’s go exclusively to people from underrepresented groups, or everybody who participated in the mentorship program will be eligible to receive one?