Guiding Principles of Austin Code Mentorship

Within a couple of months after starting Austin Code Mentorship, our now co-organizer Alex Doll contacted me offering to provide support. At the time I was terrified of the offer. I was afraid that without a strong focus, the group would collapse into an aimless social group of clicks and language-bashing and I was worried that distributing responsibility would lead to a “design by committee”-style catastrophe. ACM was inspired by Portland’s long-running Mentorship Saturdays and I wanted to create a similarly encouraging and welcoming community. While I had a general idea of what I wanted the group to stand for, I hadn’t ever organized these thoughts into cohesive directives.

I didn’t respond to Alex for several days. Instead I took time to analyze what I liked about Mentorship Saturdays and what I considered “success” for Austin Code Mentorship. Eventually I responded with an outline of four ideals that really all boiled down to one core goal: to try to make Austin Code Mentorship as inclusive as possible to everyone interested in programming.

Recently these guiding principles came up again with another member of the group. That, plus our group passing 2000 members, made me think that it might be beneficial to share an outline of these ideals with the members of Austin Code Mentorship.

Four Guiding Principles

• Inclusive: We want to create a safe, welcoming environment for anyone interested in programming. We recognize that inclusivity means more than just opening the door - it’s a lofty and worthy goal that requires proactive attention. It affects everything we do and everyone involved.
• Language agnostic: While we think groups that specialize are great, we also think there’s great value in chatting with someone from a different tech stack. People can take over rooms and do talks about niche tech, but those are opt-in activities for people rather than the default.
• Loosely structured: Similarly, we think hackathons and lectures are invaluable resources for developing as a developer; however they can be daunting to newbies or irrelevant to people in different stacks.
• Everyone’s a mentor, everyone’s a mentee: We believe everyone has something to contribute to the community. Even people who haven’t written a single line of code can give feedback on projects or just provide encouragement to others. At the same time, we believe everyone still has something to learn.

As you can see, these all circle back to inclusivity - inclusive of people, their tech preference, and their level of experience.

Inclusivity’s Effect on Structure

Just to illustrate how Austin Code Mentorship is almost self-organizing once there’s a clear priority in place, I wanted to detail how we made some of our decisions.

• We start each event with introductions. This is to reinforce everyone’s value and contribution to the group as well as helps us find people to chat with later.
• People are welcome to come and go as they need to. We realize that people have families and lives outside of tech. We also realize that there are introverts that don’t like doing the introductions: that’s cool too.
• We don’t charge members ever. This can be prohibitive to people who are currently struggling with finances and thus non-inclusive. We believe in socioeconomic inclusivity, especially since many of our members are working on improving their socioeconomic position.
• Our events are on Saturday mornings. Not everyone can make it, but we feel like it’s a time when a majority of people are off from work, when traffic is a little more bearable, and still gives people most of their weekend. Plus this gives an alternative to the typical weekday afternoon tech event.
• Our events repeat like clockwork: every first Saturday of the month from 10am-2pm, except December. This helps people plan accordingly and anticipate future events.
• We don’t organize lectures as we like to keep things language agnostic and loosely structured. However since it is loosely structured and everyone’s a mentor, we’re happy when members take a room over to make a presentation - as long as there’s still space for others to do their own thing.
• We work hard at crafting language and branding that is inclusive. This affects our aesthetic more than any other factor.
• We realize there is no true inclusivity. Paradoxically, to be inclusive means being non-inclusive of those that are non-inclusive. With every rule there are exceptions. That’s why we encourage all members to read our code of conduct so they know in advance what behavior is acceptable.

We’re not perfect. In fact we are quite imperfect. We try, we fail, and we try again. However having codified principles helps us keep focused on what’s important when things start to get foggy.

I’m very grateful to be a part of a community that shares these ideals. Alex was on-board with these core values from the beginning and we’ve only grown in the number of people who take these principles to heart.