Ad-hoc help outside of a formal mentorship

[benkolera]

A type of assistance that is left out by this process as it stands is having a good way of asking ad-hoc questions of other people. These questions could either be too simple for a formal mentorship or are vague, contextual and hard to preempt like "I'm think this code can be more functional / more clear but I have no idea how to make it that way".

The formal process is great for longer term goals, but we need a nice way to let people know that there are people are available for more informal / ad-hoc help if they need it to. The process for this should be much less formal and almost zero-cost so that we don't set the barrier of entry too high. It needs to be very clear that the mentors are there and willing to help and that no question is too simple or misplaced.

Then if there are recurring patterns in the informal help, a formal mentorship should be formed from there.

It would be really nice to have a record of the informal help so that we could identify common patterns in help required and perhaps use it to tailor talk content, but this could not be at the expense of making it harder for the mentor or mentee.