On-boarding guide for UNICEF Venture Fund teams

Justin W. Flory
Terms of reference for being on-boarded to the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme as a start-up.

This document is for teams newly joining the UNICEF Venture Fund. It provides a high-level overview to the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme, a unique perk and strategic asset of being a UNICEF investee.

1. Summary of UNICEF Open Source Mentorship 🔗

Your assigned Open Source Mentor from the Venture Fund can be found on the programme team list. In the next few months, your assigned mentor will work with you to develop your business models with Free and Open Source intellectual property, build an open-first intellectual property strategy, and explore early dynamics of building community around your intellectual property.

There are two formats of mentorship to expect:

  1. Direct support over audio/video calls

  2. Self-serve resources to help you better understand working “open”

In Months 1-6, CEOs/founders, CTOs, and/or leads of engineering are encouraged to join Open Source Mentorship calls. The first six months focus on business models, understanding intellectual property law and policy, and matching an Open Source license to the business model. The first half of the Open Source Mentorship programme debunks stereotypes, and shares honest strengths and weaknesses of working with Open Source software, hardware, data, and content. At the end of the six months, the executive leadership team will have a better understanding of how Open Source enables innovation. At the latest, you will be working in public repositories by the end of the six months.

In Months 7-12, engineering leads, project managers, and developers are encouraged to join Open Source Mentorship calls. The second six months focus on implementation details of structuring your Open Source project in a way where it can scale. Topics during this time might be an Open Source documentation site, testing and continuous integration pipelines, git pull request workflows, and more. At the end of the second six months, the technical team will have a better understanding of how to carry out their work in a way compatible with an Open Source project.

1.1. Monthly 60m check-ins 🔗

Each team is asked to check-in once a month, in a one-hour meeting, with the Open Source Mentor. Recurring monthly meetings have the following agenda:

  1. Recap of previous month’s discussion and action items

  2. Team shares verbal/oral update on previous items, collaborations, and partnerships

  3. Looking ahead for the next month, connecting back to Open Source Mentorship programme objectives.

Note: The first meeting with the Open Source Mentor, the Induction Meeting, typically runs 90 minutes.

1.2. Ad-hoc 30m meetings 🔗

Your team may request a 30-minute ad-hoc meeting with the Open Source Mentor up to two times a month if there is a specific topic to cover beyond scheduled monthly check-ins. While monthly calls are typically strategic and high-level, an ad-hoc meeting is a chance to get personalized, direct support on any Open Source topic. An ad-hoc meeting typically focuses on one or two clearly-scoped topics.

Contact the Open Source Mentor via email to request a 30-minute ad-hoc meeting. When reaching out, please offer a preferred and alternate date/time available to meet.

2. Meet the Inventory 🔗

Additionally, there is a self-serve resource available: the UNICEF Open Source Inventory. You are browsing it now!

The Open Source Inventory is a knowledge-base of best practices around creating and working with Open Source works. This is an important resource for the Open Source Mentorship and was created based on experiences of previous graduates of the UNICEF Venture Fund. You can also request new topics to be added to the knowledge-base too.

3. Topics covered in Open Source Mentorship 🔗

See Modules.

Updated on 19 Sep 2022