

Piercing the Tech Networking Bubble with Open Mentoring - vanessa
http://vanessahurst.com/80059811

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tryitnow
OK, this is an awesome idea, great to see it started. I hope it succeeds
wildly - ohours.org looks like a great site, definitely plan on using it.

My background is in economics, so my concern is this: There will almost always
be more mentors than mentees. So we have an immediately supply/demand problem.
How do we end up limiting the number of mentees available for a mentor? Just
by chance? That's rarely a good resource allocation strategy.

How to resolve this? In economics, the answer is to price the mentor's time,
but paying a potential mentor is really like business coaching and it kind of
removes the "feel good" aspect of this.

How about having a mentor select a charity that the mentee donates to in
exchange for a meeting with the mentor? This helps to solve the rationing
problem by filtering potential mentees by willingness to pay, but doesn't turn
it into a completely commercial transaction because the mentor is still in it
for the right reason.

I don't know how to solve the problem, just throwing that out as an admittedly
half-formed possibility.

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goatcurious
Good stuff Vanessa! Plan on making use of it sometime soon.

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mgkimsal
applause for taking the plunge. i was thinking about something similar after
watching it last night.

