This space is created to participants of Mentoring Program as Mentees can publish their own reports on their attendance.
Report by Glenn McKnight, Mentor
I had the good fortune to be one of the mentors for three brilliant and active ALS members from NARALO. My mentees were Judith Hellerstein, Konstantin Kalaitzidis and Scott Sullivan
We contacted each other weeks before London in joint Skype calls to discuss their individual issues and concerns, plan for specific meetings and address any travel issues. I highly recommend that mentors and mentees make an effort to do the same and learn to get to know each other prior to the face to face. I was surprised to learn at our London meeting that a number of mentors didn't meet each other prior to the meeting. Perhaps we needed to faciliate a formal get together on the first day of Atlas on the Saturday so that shy mentees can do the speed dating thing.
My other observation about the mentorship program was the high level of diversity of the needs and wants of the individuals. As a mentor I think we need feedback/ranking on the accessibility/helpfullness/resourcefulness etc so we know who actually did their job or not
Report by Eduardo Díaz, Mentor
I had five people assigned to me. One, Anthony Niiganii, I mentored during a previous ICANN meeting and by this meeting he was well acquainted with ICANN. In any case, I made myself available to help with any question which I did at various times. Garth Bruen and Monique Chartran were very knowledgeable about ICANN and did not require mentoring at all. Yubelkys Ramos was very new to ICANN and I did mentor her almost all the time. As a result, I believe she was able to understand some of the ICANN intricacies and was able to do lots of networking with people from other regions. I was not able to meet with Robert Castonguay.
For future efforts similar to this, I recommend doing a couple of conference calls between mentors/mentees to get more acquainted before getting to the meeting. Also, I will not include people with lots of knowledge about ICANN in the list of mentees. It does not make sense.