Hi,

Aside from news posts about new cycles there's no real info that I could find on the initiative. Well, it's also really straightforward so maybe i'm just yapping...

As far as I understand, BN Mentorship has been largely successful and we treat the people that get mentored in it a bit differently:

1. If the participant is deemed ready by the end of the cycle, the NAT will create their application and manually process it
2. to my understanding (which might be wrong), the applications that do get created are more or less a pass based on the activities in the BN mentorship cycle and are created to give the people feedback on what to do during Probation.

I have the following questions:

1. Would we (NAT) entertain the prospect of i.e. letting BN evaluators / former team members / other trusted community members be mentors there?
   
   1. I'm asking this because right now, there's like 4, 3, 2 and 2 classes respectively which somewhat limits throughput, scaling it up sounds cool to me, and may be another avenue into joining NAT down the road (which we wanted to add from last changes anyways)
2. Does the process need some more documentation?
3. I noticed with the current cycle of people that we asked for the BN security check after everyone was ready, we will probably move this forward to "start of the cycle" right?

I think, overall, it should be explained as some route into BN on the "Becoming a beatmap nominator" or whatever section on wiki, too

Thoughts?

TLDR: It's not really a proposal and more like
"Hey can we scale it up if we keep it around or does this not work?" and "We should document it exists somewhere on wiki"

Okoratu wrote:

1. Would we (NAT) entertain the prospect of i.e. letting BN evaluators / former team members / other trusted community members be mentors there?

Don't see why not if we make the addition process somewhat stringent (impose certain levels of standards i.e. tenure length, BN proficiency, past mentorship experience) and carefully assessed by the NAT.

Could also involve NATs with the final sanity check prior to adding users, i.e. having the mentors present a detailed report on their experience with the mentees and whether they think they're ready or not, and have that assessed by a few NATs

Okoratu wrote:

1. Does the process need some more documentation?

I was waiting for the system to marinate a bit before fully adopting it via wiki documentation, and considering that past rounds were proven successful, I/we can work on proper wiki documentation once the current cycle ends.

Okoratu wrote:

1. I noticed with the current cycle of people that we asked for the BN security check after everyone was ready, we will probably move this forward to "start of the cycle" right?

The checks happened before the start and near the end IIRC, so I don't think anything needs to be changed about this?

Hivie wrote:

The checks happened before the start and near the end IIRC, so I don't think anything needs to be changed about this?

im not sure, i just saw the wave of sec check questions thrown in there a few days ago and was liek "wow it'd be really awkward if one of them failed now"

I agree that if the BN mentorship is consistent it can also be added onto Becoming a Beatmap Nominator wiki page.

What would you define as "other trusted community members" though? I also have mixed feelings about letting some former team members deal with BN mentorship for certain reasons (or if anything I'd agree max if that person would've been a NAT within a year, who knows how much rusty former members would've become over the time).
BN Evaluators last for 1 month max if I recall correctly so it wouldn't be an option either.

if anything what I would personally suggest in this situation is to make new NAT additions, but instead of taking care of BN applications they deal with mentorship on their own. Just like some deal with internal management, web dev, etc.

Since former NATs most of the time can rejoin whenever they want anyway (unless some unexpected circumstances happened) I'd say if what I said above would happen they can just rejoin NAT but take care of the mentorship itself.

Edit: I made this before Hivie but I fw his idea actually i think it would work

Okoratu wrote:

Would we (NAT) entertain the prospect of i.e. letting BN evaluators / former team members / other trusted community members be mentors there?

there's quite a large disparity between the amount of mentee applications and the number of available mentors right now so i support this as well

i was thinking something along the lines of allowing any current BN who's been full for at least x months (doesn't have to be consecutive) to apply, and the NAT mentors would filter the applicants based on some criteria. though i'm not too sold on having community members that aren't currently in a BN/NAT position to become a mentor for a BN mentorship

Re security check: iirc it was checked before the cycle starts, but just got double checked when we are going to do the BN addtion for safety sake

I'd be more than down to let experienced and willing BNs be the ones to mentor newcomers. I believe we have people more than capable and up for the task. However, I'd be way more reticent to let anyone but BNs be mentors for BN Mentorship specifically. Maybe allowing up to Former BNs.

The Mania NAT - both NAT mentors and not - held a thread in which we discussed how our mentees did and which ones we'd like to see go through. Formalizing this process later down the road would probably be a must. Somewhat of a "pseudo-app", where the application itself is both a mentee's commitment to the program and their mentor's assessment of them. This would essentially mean that Mentors work as Evaluators of some sorts, to some degree.

Considering we're only three cycles in and stuff is still everchanging, it's probably worth waiting a bit till an article is formalized in the wiki. We'd probs first need to, as a group, discuss how it went.

very nice idea, glad to hear the BN mentorship is going well, this is very good change.

kinda doubt about the former BN part, unless they resigned recently, u gotta keep up with the new meta

and definitely dont accept anyone who never been BN. it just doesnt sound convincing for mentee perspective

and if u do accept BN, maybe ignore the mentorship period for nom activity? or lower it? not must though, just an idea

1. Personally i think since the goal of the program itself is to train people skill and capability to be good enough as BN or can be immediately promoted as BN, There needs to be certain credibility from the mentor itself teaching the mentees that they are indeed still keeping up with current mapping and modding trend, thus i think this should be limited to just current BN + Possibly former BN with certain condition

That being said, i think we can make the requirement to be something like this:

a.) For BN who want to apply mentorship, i think the minimal tenure experience they have as BN needs to be at least 6 months or 1 year (up to the majority to decide for this.) , We need the credibility of long enough tenure for the mentor to work anyway.
b.) For BN who recently resigned (Former BN) , they need to be someone who recently resigned on good terms + also resigned within last 1 year assuming it's on good terms.

The reason why it's 1 year is because those former BNs are allowed to instantly rejoin full BN within 1 year anyway, so it makes no differences in that regard.

2. I assume documentation will be made sooner for whole BN mentorship program since the program has been proven successful and this will be program that will be a continuous program as well.

3. Actually i already forgot if this one already been done before the cycle, i think my memory has been fuzzled about this xD.
But either way i think it's imperative to make the sec check happened at the beginning of cycle anyway (to be exact before the teaching started). We want to avoid things happening after we go through all the program cycle.

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In any case, endorse this but with the extra note and condition that i mentioned earlier.

I don't think we should expand the program too much from its current state for two reasons.

1. For optics purposes, we should avoid a situation where "get picked for mentorship or you don't have a chance" becomes a common belief in the mapping community, especially if it's inaccurate
2. Mentorship is a significant time commitment on the mentors' end - the more mentors we add, the more oversight NATs need to do to ensure the BNs are doing their jobs adequately, further increasing our workload to a potentially unsustainable level

As such, I oppose further expansion beyond noting that this program exists on the "Path to BN" page.

well 1. it already kinda looks like that ig. esp given the qty of people to get probation last cycle so i think that's a non-issue?

2. is fair, what about making participation in a cycle there like a bn evaler round to see if that works out similarly or not?

dunno if bns are interested in idea for 2.