Mentor Assignments, Guidelines, and Information

Cabinet
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Greetings, Mentors!

This thread will serve as an overall guide to assist you in your work to mentor the new players in the community. Below are the current mentors, their mentees, and other useful information. Mentors should provide me or the PM with updates so that we can keep this table up to date.

Mentors will have been integrated into the region themselves and should possess a foundation of understanding of TSP’s history and culture and/or experience within the regional interworkings. If you are not a mentor and would like to become one, please message me.

Mentor (Forum Name) Current Mentee Status Current Office(s) Specialty/Interest(s)
Anjo* EmpireOfVospia First Contact Delagate
Concrete Slab* X Unassigned MoD & OWL
Cryo* X Unassigned CoA
Griffindor* Izhtat, classyjazzy, Gordon Freeman, Tenrec First Contact, First Contact, Maintenence, First Contact MoE & Justice High Court stuff, Assembly
Human Sanity* Jojoshua First Contact MoFA & General
Kris Kringle* X Unassigned Chief Justice Historical research, spreadsheets
Maluhia* X Unassigned MoC
Penguin* X Unassigned CRS
ProfessorHenn* Trey First Contact PM
Pronoun* Eastern_Panem First Contact Justice & General* Assembly, SPSF, Tech-stuff
Purple Hyacinth* CrazyCarter First Contact N/A
Vietnam* X Unassigned N/A Tech-stuff

(*)Indicates that the Mentor was part of the initial, pre-launch, group.

On Mentors and Mentees
All mentors should strive to welcome the player to the forums and offer their assistance should they ask for it. Each mentee will automatically be assigned a mentor upon joining the forums. A mentee, by default, will be opted-IN to the program but can choose to opt out if they prefer.

Each mentor will ideally get one mentee at a time. This is obviously contingent upon the total number of mentors that apply and mentees that join the forums. At such time as the mentor/mentee process reaches the drawdown, concluded, or inactive stages, a new mentee could be assigned to a mentor.

Mentors will receive their mentees based on a couple of factors (precedence in descending order):

  1. Current mentor status: Mentors in the aforementioned statuses will be considered first, though unassigned mentors will get precedence.
  2. Interest match of the mentee to mentor: Example: if a mentee expresses interest in the SPSF then a general or SPSF soldier will get mentorship priority.
  3. Mentor preference, if stated

Status Breakdown

There are seven different statuses that a mentor/mentee could be in:

  1. Unassigned: This means that you, as a mentor, do not currently have an active, dedicated mentee. While you do not have a mentee, it is recommended that you serve as a role model for the community and generally be a guide for newer players in public spaces (greeting new forum users, answering questions when they are asked, providing access to information, etc.)
  2. First Contact: This means that you, as the mentor, have been assigned a mentee and are in the process of introducing yourself, getting started, explaining your role in their development, and what sort of goals you and the mentee have for each other.
  3. Training: This stage is all about guiding the mentee through their initial days and weeks in the region. You might help the mentee with understanding relevant regional history, drafting mock laws, going on R/D missions together, or whatever else the mentee has identified as their interests.
  4. Maintenance: During this stage, you are giving the mentee slightly more space, by allowing them to stand on their feet more. Perhaps encouraging them to introduce that idea they had into the Assembly, run for a seat in government, file an amicus brief with the Court, etc.
  5. Drawdown: After you (and to a certain extent, the mentee) have reached a satisfactory point in their training, such as a successful election to government, passage of a law, several SPSF missions completed, etc. You will begin to draw down your handholding and push them, metaphorically, from the nest into the community. You will still be there for them, and if they appear to retreat from public life, find out what might be needed.
  6. Conclusion: After several weeks/months, the mentee is now a fully-fledged member of the community and contributes toward the betterment of the region. At this point, your mentorship is at an end; you should still interact with the mentee, but more as a friend and peer, rather than a student/mentee.
  7. Inactive/CTE: This stage occurs when the mentee either CTEs, stops responding for more than a week, or moves regions. If the mentee is at risk of going into this status, the mentor should make a concerted effort to reach out to their mentee (Discord, forum, TG, etc.) to get them back into active status.

Mentor Guide

The mentorship program does not have a dedicated playbook planned, nor does it have any specific curriculum or path that needs to be followed. However, there are a couple of broad strokes that should be achieved:

  1. The mentee should get integrated into the community. Whether it be through active debate, seeking election, or participation in various groups (cards, SPSF, etc.), success will be measured by the mentee’s activities post-mentorship.
  2. Mentees should have a general grasp of TSP history, especially on events within the last year or two. I am not saying that a mentee (nor mentor) should have to know what took place on May 26, 2016 or anything, but just a general overview of what did happen at that time.
  3. Mentees should have a general grasp of TSP culture. They will largely find this out for themselves as culture evolves, but the basics of SPIT and Lampshades (and why some of our categories are named in certain ways) helps.
  4. The mentor should have a sense of achievement when the mentee is set loose. If you don’t feel like you made a positive impact on the mentee (and the region), then your work might not be quite done yet.
  5. To an extent, you might also plan on your mentee taking over a position you might hold. This is similar in line with the deputy idea that the Cabinet had whereby a minister is training their successor.

If you have any questions, comments on how to improve, other feedback, or would like to register to become a mentor, please comment below.

MENTORS: Please DM me or reply to this thread with your specialty/interests that you would like to mentor for should a new forum user appear with those specific interests.

NOTE: The graph as it stands is for visual representation at this moment only; once actual mentees begin joining, the graph will be reset.

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Thanks for publishing this! I’m excited to see where this goes. I’d say my specialties/interests would be the military, the Assembly, and tech development; if you or other see my personal strengths or interests differently, that’s fine as well, though I will say I’d rather not be offering up semi-official legal commentary or advice outside of the Court.

With respect to feedback — from reading this over, it feels a little more formal than I might have imagined. For instance, if someone’s interested in the military, it’d probably be my job to train them anyway and be available to support them, and having these different statuses feels like administrative overhead in that context. I do think having someone reach out and make themselves available to answer questions or offer advice is valuable, but I guess my personal mental image of a mentor was more of an advisor or resource than a teacher or trainer. (I also think that could make the combination of automatic opt-ins plus every mentee being assigned a mentor more manageable, as opposed to cookie-cutter welcome messages and mentorship if there’s less of a mindset to cover all the bases in ‘training’ the mentee.)

Feedback aside, though, I do want to close this off on a more upbeat note because I do think it’s fantastic that the Ministry of Engagement is working on a project like this. It’s evident that a good amount of thought went into this and overall I would say it’s looking pretty great!

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Thank you for the feedback; much of this is likely to change as things become calibrated to the successes and failures of the program.

I took the liberty of taking the first two new forum users today as my mentees to find out exactly what I would be getting y’all into, so expect some calibration based on that too.

Referring to the different statuses, I can totally see how it might look a bit too formal and administrative. This will likely change over time, as I said.

In your military example, the goal is to ensure that the mentee is given to the right mentor, more so that they are guaranteed to get to the area that they want to be in, but also to make sure that the other mentors are utilized just as well with someone who wants to work on legislation stuff mostly. You might very well be helping them with training and ops (even if you weren’t formally their mentor), but this way, you are also able to be a bit more one-on-one with them to ensure that they got the desired experience and understanding from that.

I would also like to reiterate that this thread is also not the official “you must follow this” guide. It is really just a space where I (or whoever) can keep track of the mentor/mentee breakdown. Each individual mentor will advise/train/support/etc. their mentee how they best see fit. Success is measured in the retention of the mentee rather than a test of some sort.

Thank you again for the feedback!