Mentoring/Informal

Informal mentoring helps everyone involved and happens all the time. It is not tracked or managed. Keep doing what you do and have fun! The following ideas and resources might be useful as you think about your need for training and mentoring or your desire to help others.

Details

• Editors asking and answering questions in the forums and live chat.
• Can take place anytime, without any special process to set up the interaction.
• There is no approval process to be an informal mentor.
• Advice can range from exceptionally good to highly questionable depending upon the provider.
• Task oriented: solve a current problem in editing and nothing more (e.g., how to fix a particular junction that is giving bad directions or bad map appearance).
• Generally lasts a few minutes or a few hours, with little to no recurring communication expected.
• Provides instant answers to questions, but cannot track the quality of the information provided.
• Not expected to significantly change the abilities of the Mentee and no expectation for change in rank during or after the mentorship.

Informal mentoring ideas

• Ask a question in a Waze Forum.
• Ask for help in WME Chat.
• Send a PM to a higher-level editor you have seen around Waze, or an Area Manager, State Manger, or Regional Coordinator for that region (check on your state wiki for an Area Manager list).
• Utilize web conferencing/screen sharing to communicate with one or more editors while learning and editing on a project (there are many free tools for this, such as Google Hangouts).
• Establish a Google+ Communitiy to help local or regional editors learn from each other.
• Organize a local Meet-up of editors in your region for a Waze conversation over lunch.

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Mentoring is a great way to learn from those with more experience or to pass down your experience to others, but the interaction usually ends up helping everyone and creating a better Waze community for all.

Overview

Mentoring is the process where a more experienced person (the mentor) imparts knowledge and skill to one who is less experienced (the protege, or in the terms of Waze Formal Mentoring programs, the mentee).

Typically a Mentor is much more experienced than a Mentee. In some cases a Mentor may have less general experience, but significant specialty knowledge in one or more topics. For instance, such a Mentor may know a lot about a regional issue, city, or state, or type of road system. There are two main forms of mentoring in Waze; Formal Mentoring, and Informal Mentoring. One is not intended to replace the other, but instead they are designed to coexist. Each form has its' own benefits and disadvantages which will be discussed below.

Formal mentoring

For more details on Formal Mentoring, see Mentoring/Formal.

Formal Mentoring is a structured program, where a specific officially approved Waze Mentor and a Mentee are brought together, with a responsibility to accomplish a specific goal. The goal will be a defined objective, duration, and under a common set of rules, with the purpose to better some aspect of their Waze interaction. The objective may be building a particular skill over time, learning to participate in a certain aspect of the Waze community, learning how a portion of the Waze technology works, or mastering the skills required to increase the Mentees' editing rank.

Formal Mentoring can accelerate advancement of editor rank and/or roles while maintaining quality of editing and Waze Community interaction.

A Formal Mentoring arrangement will define the methods of communication, the frequency, and their intensity, and will include a definable objective, and normally a target date for completion.

Informal mentoring

For more details on Informal Mentoring, see Mentoring/Informal.

Most of the mentoring on Waze takes place informally, without structure. Informal Mentoring goes on all the time when one Wazer asks a question of another and when one Wazer helps another. This happens any time two editors with different experience levels in some aspect of editing get together to help the Mentee better understand that aspect, and how to implement that knowledge.

We encourage you to engage in such interaction regularly and have some ideas for you here. Examples include the Waze Forum, WME Chat, dialog through Private Messages, and much more. Becoming a regular Informal Mentor is a great way to see if you're good at teaching various editing skills, and might be interested in Formal Mentoring.

Informal Mentoring usually either has no goal beyond the immediate issue at hand, or it may be a repeated interaction without an overarching defined goal guiding all of those interactions. Neither party has any formal responsibility to the other.

Mentoring resources

A list of available resources which can be used as part of both Formal, and Informal Mentoring is available at Mentoring/Resources.

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All the Mentoring program pages are linked in the box below. New pages can be added to this list by clicking here.