Tiling Interfaces Code Sprint: Call for Mentors 📢
Tags: mentoring, coding, gis, maps
Published: 2023-05-23 11:39:46

_We are looking for volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of the [Tiling Interfaces Code Sprint](https://developer.ogc.org/sprints/21/) (12-14/06/2023), by offering tutorials or 1:1 mentoring._

## What's the Code Sprint About 📣
The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event, where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of tiling standards, more specifically: OGC API Tiles, OGC API Maps, the Vector Tiles Extension to GeoPackage, Variable Width Tile Matrix, the Changesets API and WMTS (DGIWG and NSG profiles). The code sprint takes place at the [Moonshot labs of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (St. Louis, MO, US)](https://www.nga.mil/resources/Moonshot_Labs.html) and on the [OGC-events Discord server](https://discord.gg/3uyaZZuXr3). This code sprint is hosted by the [Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)](https://www.ogc.org/) and the [ National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)](https://www.nga.mil/). You can find more information about the event on the [sprint page](https://developer.ogc.org/sprints/21/).

## What's this Call About 📣
In the code sprint we would like to also welcome developers which are new to OGC standards, but are keen to learn more about them. Although they can attend the main track, they may feel a bit lost there, so we would like to offer them a parallel track, with more suitable content. On the mentor stream, developers will have the opportunity to give their first steps using the standards and products/services that implement the standards, and hopefully this will build an engagement which will continue past the code sprint.

We have opened a call for volunteers from OGC WGs or standards users/implementers, to participate in this mentor stream. 

## How can I get involved 🤹‍♀️
If you are interested in being a mentor, these are the main activities where your contribution would be most valuable.

### Tutorial 
You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the [topics](https://github.com/opengeospatial/developer-events/wiki/Tiling-Interfaces-Code-Sprint#topics-books) of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find [here](https://github.com/opengeospatial/developer-events/wiki/Open-Standards-and-Open-Source-Software-Code-Sprint#geoxacml-30--fine-grained-access-control-with-spatio-temporal-conditions) an example of a mentor stream tutorials. To propose a tutorial, you can edit [this](https://github.com/opengeospatial/developer-events/wiki/Tiling-Interfaces-Code-Sprint#mentor-streams-mortar_board) section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel . You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

### 1:1 Mentoring
Even with a stream of tutorials available to start with, some people may still feel a bit lost. To address this, we would like to offer them the opportunity to find a mentor that could be a point of contact during the code sprint and support them in their activities, or at least point them to someone who could help them. If you are running a tutorial, we would encourage you to be a mentor, but you could be a mentor even if you are not without doing any tutorials. There is a section of channels which is dedicated to #Mentoring. If you would like to be a mentor, please get in touch so we can assign you a #mentor role on discord. Once the code sprint starts, we encourage you to introduce yourself on the #whois channel and attend the #find-a-mentor room - this is the channel where people will look for 1:1 mentoring. You don’t need to be an expert in all the topics covered during this code sprint, and you certainly do not need to be available 24:7 during the code sprint. We appreciate your contribution, even if it is for a limited period of time.

_If you have any queries, please get in touch by email (<devrel@ogc.org>) or in discord by DM (to doublebyte#8420). We really appreciate your collaboration in making this code sprint more community based and hopefully contributing towards growing your own community._ 💚