Mentorship/mentee connections

[wil-gerard]

I'd love to help connect those looking to mentor with those looking for mentorship. This idea expands on our user tag system - by adding a searchable "mentor" tag. I believe we can connect to the Calendly API so users can schedule coffee chats directly in our app.

User story

As a user, I can:

• Connect my git-connected account with Calendly
• Add a "mentor" tag from the "My Profile" page
• Search and filter users with a "mentor" tag
• Schedule a coffee chat through the Calendly API by clicking a "Coffee Chat" button on a user's profile

[whoadood]

As someone who feels like they could benefit from a mentor, I love this idea. maybe there could be a way to validate mentors, similar to linkedin's endorsements - a simple way to say this mentor added value to my skills without being a 1 - 5 stars review.

[wil-gerard]

I'd love to build on this idea by incentivizing connections/mentoring:

• Moving the featured 100Dev to the homepage and creating a point system for who gets featured
• Every user has their own public profile page with detailed Twitter/GitHub/LinkedIn info
• Connect to the LinkedIn API and allow folks to be able to view and write recommendations
• If you write a recommendation for a mentor or mentee, your chances of being featured on the homepage increases
• Following users also increases your chances of being featured
• The number of recommendations written | mentorship chats | follows is viewable on a users profile
• You can earn badges or achievements that are viewable on a users profile

We could also create a leaderboard featuring the point system

[whoadood]

I was playing around with connecting to the LinkedIn API and came to the same conclusion you did early March, looks like their consumer facing API is pretty limited. Didn't get into the endorsement API docs too much as it looks like it hinges on LinkedIn's approval. I have some ideas for a point weighting system:

• every featured cycle a user is not featured 1 point is added to their account
• following a user adds 1 point to account / both accounts?
• recommendations will award the average number of points for all users / 2
• featured profile chosen by highest points OR randomly chosen from all users with highest points
• once featured, add user to featuredTimeout list, points return to 0 next featured cycle

Initially I would think to schedule a cron job to handle the featured cycle but I'm not sure how/if that would work with Heroku

[Lala0419]

I love this idea so much! I have applied for a government-organized mentorship program about 3 weeks ago. I am still in the process of getting into the program and I haven't even met my mentor, yet. I wish this process was faster and also it would have been so much better for candidates if we could get more info about the mentor.

As I am a non-native English speaker, it would be nice if there is a future that can search by language too.