My contribution to Mentoring in the PHP Community

After the awesome mentorship summit at php[tek] 2013 a little over a week ago, I decided that as part of my contributions to mentoring in the community I would put out a call:

Anyone and everyone who would like to speak at a conference, I want to review and critique your talk submissions.

As part of this, I’d like to offer an opportunity for to you bounce ideas for talks off me, to work with you on tightening up your title/abstract, and if I have time, to review slides and/or do a google hangout run through prior to you speaking.

To make this process as easy and efficient as possible:

  • If you want to bounce ideas off me, you can find me on #phpmentoring on Freenode IRC, or ping me via Twitter for IM details.
  • For proposal review, please put them in a gist and we can work from there — just ping me on Twitter beforehand, and then once I get back to you I’ll ask for the gist link.
  • For slide review, ask on Twitter/IRC — and don’t be upset if I say no. This is a much more time consuming thing.
  • For hangouts, do one of the first two things and if it’s something I’d like to see, I’ll probably suggest it

I hope in this way I can help a bunch of people in a fairly informal way, and we can bring a bunch of new blood to the speaking circuit.

Also: please don’t limit this to just PHP-related topics. I’m happy to give advice on many more things (that I feel qualified for), soft and hard topics.

Comments
  • Aaron Saray
    Posted May 26, 2013 11:56 am 0Likes

    I’m very happy to see this type of blog post! Working with my local groups in the Milwaukee area, I strive to do the same thing. I’ve seen too many people view industry leaders as an ivory tower – and feel like they can’t approach them – or like the respected programmers “don’t have time” for them. Why is it that we all work with open source software, contribute to each other via source control, but remain unavailable in more traditional communication methods? :)

    So, keep up the good work – I’m hoping that a number of people take advantage of your offer. :)

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