Thank you to Ranti for setting up the wiki page!  Please post your name 
to that page as others have started to do if you have any interest in 
being involved with the mentorship program.  It doesn't matter what your 
gender is to participate, but if you have a preference for who you'd 
like to be matched with, you can state it there and we'll do our best to 
meet your wishes.

Mentee works for me, but The MIT program I referenced in an earlier 
email uses the word "partner" instead.  I changed it to that on the wiki 
page to "partner", but if anyone has objections, we can hash it out on 
the wiki page... not worth putting everyone on list through a labeling 
debate.

-Shaun

On 12/7/12 9:54 AM, Joseph Montibello wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wouldn't want to crowd out women who are looking for this sort of
> mentoring, but I (and other men) might be interested in being a mentee[1].
> The flip side of MJ's logic (which I agree with) is that no men in the
> pool of mentees means fewer opportunities for women to be mentors.
>
> Just my two cents.
> Joe Montibello, MLIS
> Library Systems Manager
> Dartmouth College Library
> 603.646.9394
> [log in to unmask]
>
> [1] dumb aside on the word mentee - from Wikipedia, "The person in receipt
> of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female),
> an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee." Protégé(é) appeals to me
> more than mentee, but maybe that's because my brain jumps from mentee to
> mentees to Mentos. I don't want to volunteer to be dropped into a bottle
> of soda! Also, I don't have enough linguistics/language history to know if
> protégée is a female derivative of the male form, which would probably be
> undesirable.
>
> On 12/7/12 8:52 AM, "MJ Ray" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Shaun Ellis <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Hi Rosalyn,
>>> I agree that we should encourage women to step up and mentor other
>>> women
>>> at Code4Lib.  I also see the pairing of women mentors with women
>>> mentees
>>> as fitting into an overall mentorship program, and I would be
>>> interested
>>> in collaborating with you and others to help frame it out.
>>
>> I think pairing would need to be done pretty carefully and I'm not
>> sure that only pairing women with women, for example, would be a good
>> thing.
>>
>> Even ignoring my belief that it would be sexist, it could cause
>> practical problems by creating a feedback loop: fewer women in the
>> community probably means fewer women mentors available for women
>> learners, leading to slower promotion of women into the community.
>>
>> Hope that explains,
>> --
>> MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
>> http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
>> In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
>> Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/

-- 
Shaun D. Ellis
Digital Library Interface Developer
Firestone Library, Princeton University
voice: 609.258.1698 | [log in to unmask]