Update, November 30

After diving into our research process, I (Alex) am updating this milestone to reflect the work done to date, alongside the work to be done.

We're pursuing a more fluid research process in which we are exploring different paths in parallel:

1. Speaking to code school students & graduates regarding their motivations to learn how to code
2. Speaking to faculty at codeschools to understand student motivations (from their perspective), how they utilize assessments in their courses, and what kind of post-graduation support they offer.
3. Speaking to developers to gauge their past experience with mentors/mentor figures in helping develop their experience, and in doing so to shortlist those that may be more predisposed to participating in a prototype program.
4. Speaking to bounty issuers, dapps, and other orgs using bounties to scope out work to be completed by the wider crypto community. We want to learn how they're using bounties, what pain points are coming up, what kind of work they are using with these bounties, and ultimately whether we can use bounties as a learning mechanism (i.e. for mentors/mentees to pair program on).

Simultaneously, we're getting experience on the proposed mentorship program we've developed.

Since this research process has shifted considerably since we began, I've extended the milestone deadline to December 31st.

Update, October 26th

After agreeing on our revised execution strategy (re mentorships, guilds) in Amsterdam, this milestones dates have been brought up to the start of November.

This will comprise two pieces:

1. An initial set of interviews to be conducted with mentors, mentees, and bounty operators to assess their interest in the project.

2. If the above is validated, then we'll begin the first phase of mentorship and conduct on-going research & observations to see how the process unfolds.

In this milestone, we will:

1. Organize & conduct internal (to the mesh) and external (to selected members of the public) user interviews.

2. We'll record the information from the interviews into Airtable or a similar tool.

3. We'll synthesize the results, find common patterns, and determine if our hypothesis (That people are interested in mentorship-based learning for Solidity) is correct.