FY22-Q1: Volunteer Coaches for URGs - Planning => 84%

Introduction

In FY21Q4 we have ended out Working Group for Upstream Diversity. This working group resulted in a program that allows team members at GitLab to volunteer and donate their time and technical skills (such as programming or Linux administration) to provide knowledge, support, and coaching to members of underrepresented groups (URGs) in the technology industry. Handbook page here. The hope is we can help people who have been denied opportunity for whatever reason, and desire to get their first job in the technology industry.

This issue will be used to set goals for FY22Q1 and track events where the list of coaches can contribute to.

Goals

  1. Matching at least 5 GitLab coaches to each Vendor
  2. Have at least 3 touchpoints (events/coaching opportunities/contributions to the vendor) per vendor in FY22Q1

Vendors

Latinitas

DRI: @mushakov

Current matched coaches: 2/5 (40%)

Upcoming Events/Touch points: 3/3 (100%)

FreeCodeCamp

DRI: @greg

Current matched coaches: 5/5 (100%)

Upcoming Events/Touch points: 3/3 (100%) (over next 7 weeks)

The partnership with freeCodeCamp will kick off with two possibilities to contribute:

  1. Help students with coding problems and tech career questions in the freeCodeCamp Forum.
  2. Update and improve the open source freeCodeCamp curriculum.

Later this year, there will be additional opportunities to contribute by:

Write a guest blog post. Contribute new instructional videos to the curriculum. Translate curriculum into Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian.

After meeting with organization leaders, they indicated that they have the desire to expand their knowledge on the following:

Technical skills/programming:

  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • HTML/CSS
  • Spanish-language

General skills:

  • Project feedback
  • Technical career advice
  • Writing instructional guides

If you are interested in volunteering as a coach and would like to help with this effort, please submit a MR to add yourself to the volunteer coaches page and assign it to @greg.

re:learn

DRI: @rtakken

Current matched coaches: 5/5 (100%)

Upcoming Events/Touch points: Current status: 2/3 (66%)

  1. FireSide chat on 2021-05-12
  2. Content advise session with Re:learn 2021-04-15
  3. Career Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0Kpc12i1SJkdSs65XL8ABlEQ

In case there are any questions/remarks please comment on the issue below.

Retrospective

Good

  • @greg Build out this great async collaboration with FreeCodeCamp: coaching#3 (closed), this will be an ongoing collaboration/contribution.
  • We had 5 team members record a career video for the vendors to sue as inspiration: #11261 (closed) , what is great about this is that we can use and reuse this content

Bad

  • Lack of coaches for Latinitas: Eventhough we have shared multiple times on staff meetings and in the #cto Slack channel we were not able to get 5 coaches to sign up for Latinitas.
  • Lack of events/engagement with Re:learn. Due to an extended leave period and the updated goals of Re:learn it was not possible to set up more touchpoints in the Q1 timeframe.

Try

  • Vendors might not have enough touchpoints to collaborate over the course of 1 quarter to reach 3. When planning a KR this should be taken into account to set ambitious though reachable questions.
  • Take into consideration timezones for sync coaching.
Edited by Roos Takken