Defining Open Mentorships¶

To establish common ground in discussions throughout this handbook, we need to define a series of pervasive concepts in this context. The definitions below and in the next pages were consolidated through a process of literature review and a series of discussions with focus groups.

Mentorship¶

Our understanding of mentorship aligns with the definition by Kram (1982)¹:

Mentorship is the practice in which senior individuals (mentors) empower the professional and personal development of emerging individuals (mentees) through a series of psychosocial and instrumental activities.

Focus¶

Our interest is the manifestation of such practices in what we call open communities: communities following practices molded by open principles such as findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) and/or free and open source software (FOSS) practices.

We define free and open source software practices as those following the principles of all of the essential four freedoms²: (1) the freedom to use the software for any purpose; (2) the freedom to share and copy the software; (3) the freedom to study the software — access to the source code is a prerequisite for this; (4) the freedom to improve the software and share such modifications — access to the source code is also a prerequisite for this.

Open mentorships¶

We define open mentorships as the expansion of mentorship practices into open communities, centered around the mission of maintaining and evolving a knowledge base and/or public commons. Projects, communities or organizations may choose to foster open mentorships to train new contributors, successors and/or new leaders. Open mentorships are expected to root significant portions of its activities in open spaces through collectively supported learning experiences. Furthermore, resulting artifacts are expected to be accessible and available to all.