[LRUG] Mentoring Meetups

[Stephen Bartholomew]

Hey All,

Great meet-up last night.  Kudos to Martin for stepping up at the  
last minute.

The pub discussions got me to thinking about the best way to handle  
the mentor/mentoree situation.  The general consensus seems to be  
that people would find it useful to see an application being developed.

It's also clear that there is quite a wide range of skills with some  
people feeling that they have something to offer others but are not  
confident enough to be called a 'mentor'.  I don't personally see  
this as a problem as it's likely that we all have something to learn  
from each other - it's just that some of us are more out-spoken than  
others.

So, other than the decisions about posting questions on the mailing  
list and IRC channel, the best idea I heard is that we have a  
separate meet-up for those who'd like to expand on their current  
skills or feel they need to gain a solid grounding in ruby/rails.

The way that seemed most popular was to have an application that we  
work on as a group.  It makes sense to develop something for LRUG -  
maybe somewhere we can have profiles, arrange meet-ups etc.  I know  
this has obviously been done a thousand times before, but it'd be  
good to have focus.  It'd be great to develop an super innovation  
application that changes the world but I think it's more important  
that we have something that covers all the main parts of an application.

We can work through the whole application from design to deployment  
and ongoing maintenance and development.  During that process, the  
group as a whole should be able to fill in and improve on the  
knowledge of individuals.  The mentor's role here would be one of  
guiding the group and development rather than dishing out knowledge.

The application itself can then be bought to the standard meet-ups  
for discussion.  That way we could still tap into the minds of the  
uber-developers that we have in the group.

Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on this.

Cheers,

Steve