Piercing the Tech Networking Bubble with Open Mentoring

OK, this is an awesome idea, great to see it started. I hope it succeeds wildly - ohours.org looks like a great site, definitely plan on using it.

My background is in economics, so my concern is this: There will almost always be more mentors than mentees. So we have an immediately supply/demand problem. How do we end up limiting the number of mentees available for a mentor? Just by chance? That's rarely a good resource allocation strategy.

How to resolve this? In economics, the answer is to price the mentor's time, but paying a potential mentor is really like business coaching and it kind of removes the "feel good" aspect of this.

How about having a mentor select a charity that the mentee donates to in exchange for a meeting with the mentor? This helps to solve the rationing problem by filtering potential mentees by willingness to pay, but doesn't turn it into a completely commercial transaction because the mentor is still in it for the right reason.

I don't know how to solve the problem, just throwing that out as an admittedly half-formed possibility.

Good stuff Vanessa! Plan on making use of it sometime soon.

applause for taking the plunge. i was thinking about something similar after watching it last night.