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akrabat edited this page Nov 19, 2014 · 5 revisions

Office Hours?

Many people come to the phpmentoring channel on irc not only looking for a long term mentor, but also for short term help on subjects. Although we don't want to become a full time help channel (that's what ##php is for) it's often helpful to "try on" a mentor or apprentice before committing long term. Answering questions in the short term is also helpful for training people how to mentor correctly.

So we're setting up "office hours" on the phpmentoring irc channel

Why are we bothering?

What are office hours? Set times where known mentors (some of whom are looking for new apprentices, some not) will be available to answer questions. This should help keep the "random php help" questions to set periods of time, allow mentors and apprentices to "try each other out" before a longer term commitment, help train new mentors, and generally improve the PHP community.

It should also help with the problem that several people on the irc channel have of answering questions at all hours of the day, leading to interruptions and distractions (since a small group of people doesn't scale well)

Times and Dates

Our first office hours will be Wednesday morning from 8:30-10:30AM Eastern and Friday afternoon from 3:00-5:00PM Eastern

If you're interested in being a mentor during these time slots - add yourself to the list below and contact auroraeosrose on irc

If you are interested in mentoring during office hours and these times don't work for you, leave a note below, if we have enough volunteers we can add more times

Tools and Apps

For now, office hours will happen on the #phpmentoring channel on irc.freenode.net

We could try to use #startupflavorofthemonth app as a tool but I'd rather not for reasons of

  1. maintenance (yet another site)
  2. training folks to use it
  3. tacit endorsement of the tool

and writing another app when the mentor match tool isn't even done is not an option

Current Mentors

Name irc handle topics
Elizabeth M Smith auroraeosrose php-internals, app architecture, sockets, streams, C and C++
Matthew Turland elazar oop, design patterns, testing, web scraping, web services, git, speaking at conferences
Lorna Mitchell lornajane PHP, APIs, git, speaking, writing, leadership