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Formal mentoring is a great way for an experienced Waze editor to help expand the community, and often improve skills at the same time. You will need to become an authorized Waze Mentor to participate. How do you become a Waze Mentor? Start by reading the page and the Waze formal mentoring guidelines. Then, fill out the mentor form so the community is aware of your interest. A Waze Champ will go over with you anything else you may need to know or do. See the Formal Mentoring page for additional information.
Background
Waze Formal Mentoring is intended to be an enjoyable one-on-one interaction between a Mentor and Mentee. It will improve the skills of the Mentee as a Waze editor. At the same time the Mentor gains the opportunity to expand his/her own insight, social network, and skills.
While you may develop a long-term relationship with the Mentee, the Mentorship should have a well defined end point. It will provide enough time and level of interaction to impart a particular skill and no more.
That's formal Mentoring. There are many other informal mentoring methods using the Forum, WME Chat, WME Live Users, Private Messages, and external contact (e-mail, meetups, screen sharing). Formal mentoring doesn't replace any of that, it just provides a deeper and more better defined interaction.
Requirements: Becoming a Mentor
- Read and understand this document and the Waze formal mentoring guidelines|Waze formal mentoring guidelines
- Commitment. You are committed to Waze standards of etiquette. You will be making some Mentorship partnership agreements with mentees, and you will commit to those agreements. You will invest your time and oversight in making sure the agreement is successful.
- Skills. Mentors are experienced Waze Community members, and have Rank 4, 5, or 6. You don't have to have deep skills in every area of Waze — just make sure you can describe the editing and other community skills that you are strong in. You can suggest other Mentors to your Mentee for building skills outside your area of expertise. Mentors should be Rank-4 editors or higher. If you have unusually strong skills in a particular area, you may even mentor someone above your own rank in that area.
What you need to do with each Mentee
- Be a positive role model. Your Mentee should learn what its like to be an excellent member of the Waze Community, observing your interactions and behavior in the Forums and elsewhere. Show your mentees how to maintain a good attitude, even when facing adversity in the crowd-sourced community of Waze.
- Connect to your Mentee as a person. The most successful mentoring partnerships occur when the two editors get to know and understand each other as people. It isn't just about the skills! Be open with the Mentee, act as a sounding board, share your successes and mistakes, praise the Mentees successes, and gently explain and correct Mentee mistakes. If you sometimes cannot interact as often as they like or need, work together to find a solution, or bring in a trusted third party to help negotiate. When the mentoring partnership is over, you may continue an informal relationship with the Mentee, too!
- Have a desire to make your Mentee successful. It’s more about the Mentee than about you.
- Listen. Don’t begin with a lecture. Ask a few open-ended questions, and then sit back and let the Mentee talk. You'll get a feel for what the Mentee can do already, and where you should be headed together.
- Set specific, measurable goals. Formal mentoring is not open-ended assistance. Help your Mentee figure out what the next steps are that he or she wants to take in improving abilities as an editor. I want to go up to the next rank — that's not a goal. I want to learn how to best interact with drivers reporting UR — that's a goal! Or, I want to earn the tools needed to analyze routing directions. The Mentor can evaluate those for success or failure.
- Don't do, just asist. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, you will need to show the Mentee how to accomplish a specific task. But mostly, the Mentee should be doing the work, while you look it over and make suggestions or answer questions. As the skills build, the Mentee will do more on his or her own, often offline, with you reviewing the completed work. If you do most of the work, the Mentee is not practicing and not learning effectively.
- The end. Always seek to end or complete the mentoring activity based upon your initial agreement or when you think you’ve gone as far as you can with the stated goals. In some cases you may suggest further mentoring with another person who knows more about other topics. In some cases, the Mentee may end the relationship when they are ready. If something is interfering with your ability to mentor (changing commitments, personality conflict, incorrect skills match, language) then you may also choose to end it early, but it would be best if you considered a third party to help end it on the best of terms.
How you will follow up after mentoring is complete
Shouldn't most of this section be in the intro, not at the end? Should only be summarized here as guidance for follow-up?
The goal of Waze Formal Mentoring is to quickly raise the abilities of editors, so we have a larger pool of experienced, accomplished volunteers. We’re growing the size of the community, and the quality of the community, and we are removing roadblocks to participation and discouraging talent loss (burnout, disinterest, frustration).
Not every mentorship need to result in an editor rank change (number of cones), nor a new badge or set of responsibilities. However, at the end of a mentorship, you should consider whether the Mentee has become accomplished enough to formally rise in the community. Even if the Mentee has not, consider suggesting to the Mentee where to focus energy: on using the newly learned skills … on finding the next area to be accomplished in (whether through experience, practice, or additional mentoring) … or sometimes, if the Mentee is not proficient, advising him or her to continue focusing on their existing skills.
If the Mentee has gained many skills needed to rise in the community, you should point that out to the Regional Manager for the Mentee’s home area. (If you are a Rank 6 editor, discuss it with other Champs, unless it is a low-level decision within your sole discretion to grant.)
Sometimes, you may find that the Mentee is just not able to pick up a particular skill, or may even lack skills that an editor of their existing rank should have. Be sure to call that out to the Regional Manager (or to other Champs); never make a decision on your own to lower the rank of an editor or suspend an editor due to observations during mentoring. Doing so could lead to loss of trust in the mentoring program by the community.
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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.
All the Mentoring program pages are linked in the box below. New pages can be added to this list by clicking here.
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