Problem
Mentors get newcomers assigned to them equally. They have a parameter to decide if they like to have more or less than the average mentees assigned to them.
However, if you joined a while ago, you might already have a lot of newcomers to interact with or to monitor. Getting more mentees to take care of leads to an overwhelming situation.
Possible solution
The idea is to consider the number of active newcomers a mentor has under their responsibility when assigning them new accounts.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T326733 Take the number of newcomers already assigned to a mentor into account when assigning new accounts to them | |||
| Resolved | Urbanecm_WMF | T336430 Get the average number of mentees per mentor on all Growth wikis |
Thank you Benoît for opening this task. At es.wp, some mentors that joined before the deployment of the mentorship has reported they feel overwhelmed because the huge amount of mentees they have assigned. They already know they can reduce the amount of mentees that would be assigned to them (and, indeed, some of them change to "less than the average"), but still the number keeps growing.
The point is that the day of the deployment of mentorship at es.wp, we distributed among existing mentors all the users that already have the newcomer homepage, which means that day each of these "legacy mentors" received dozens or hundreds of mentees. On the other hand, "new mentors" (those who sign up after the deployment) starts at their role with their mentees counter at 0.
So, at the time of distributing new accounts among mentors, maybe we could consider to take this circumstance into account to avoid an unbalanced assignment among mentors, as is currently the case.
@kostajh , we don't really have an epic at the moment that this task best aligns with. Let's just keep it with the GrowthExperiments-Mentorship Phab tag for now. Martin is ok with that.
We agreed in the 2023-05-10 mentorship meeting to assign more mentees to new mentors, determined by the number of their currently assigned newcomer (if the number is lower than a certain number, the mentor's weight is fixed to "Twice the average number of newcomers").
To define the threshold, we will fetch the average number of mentees per mentor on all wikis and present the data to the Ambassadors. Based on the discussion with Ambassadors, we will determine the threshold and implement this task. Marking as Blocked on the data bit (T336430).
The data were generated in T336430#8848555, this now needs the threshold to be defined (as such, moving to Needs Discussion/Analysis). CC @KStoller-WMF and @Trizek-WMF for awareness.
Thanks! I added this topic to our next Ambassador meeting.
Although I see the benefit of this task, I feel like there is other higher priority work, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise if Ambassadors agree this is important.