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Open Source Mentorship Structure for Your Accelerator

Let's help set the startup for open source success!

From UNICEF’s Venture Fund experience, going from zero or little open source experience to developing an open source business model ready for the market could take about 8 to 12 months. It is recommended to find an open source mentor for your accelerator within the local community or working on similar projects to not only mentor but to connect the project with contributors in the community as well.

Characteristics of a good mentorship program​

A mentorship program should be tailored towards the types of companies you work with. The guidance and expertise should be inclusive of the sectors where they work, so the open source guidance is grounded in relevant communities of practice. A good mentorship program may have some or many of the below qualities:

  • Structured, recurring check-ins: Provide a regular forum to review progress, analyze approaches, and plan for next steps.
  • Asynchronous expertise and help: Tools, resources, and pre-written guidance to answer common questions or give examples of best practices.
  • Blending business leadership and engineering: Successful open source strategies have ties to several parts of a business, beyond engineering. A good mentorship program incorporates the different parts of the business that need to participate when it is most strategic to do so.
    • Example: CEO or CTO pairs with an engineering team to decide a licensing approach compatible with the business model. Support services and/or technical writers work with the engineering team to produce quality documentation. Legal resources are available for license compliance, if needed.

Sample terms of reference​

Below is a Terms of Reference for the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship (taken from UNICEF O.S. Inventory). This is used with startup companies inducted to the UNICEF Venture Fund. Feel free to use this as a guide to structure your own mentorship support:

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.

Format of Mentorship:​

  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:
  • Recap of previous month’s discussion and action items
  • Team shares verbal/oral update on previous items, collaborations, and partnerships
  • 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. 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.