I firmly agree that any mentee should be able to approach any mentor of their choosing, and that does require a culture of being open to newcomers to develop.
For how we get there, I think the pairings make the most sense at this time. Once we have a diverse and active mentor pool that can engage new players (i.e., in the “Welcome X” threads), then we could move away from pairing themselves.
As RP goes, I also concur with the need for a mentor/mentee relationship there too, but I think that will be outside the scope of this project’s aim unless a good chunk of us declare an interest in RP and want to train them.
I agree entirely with you that our “mentorship program” is extremely formal, I’m just having a fair amount of difficulty coming up with the alternative to clearly defining, developing, and then following a communicated process in terms of establishing a culture or program of mentorship. Sure, in our ideal world, everything we want to happen would just happen without governmental manipulation, but that’s not reality.
How would you reduce the amount of bureaucratic overhead in our system? Why and what are the specific benefits of that?
I’m fine with this for now. In an ideal world, we could staff this project with interested RP mentors, and perhaps it would be worth reaching out to people one-on-one to see if there are any potentially interested mentors, but we don’t have those people on the team currently.