Okay, everyone, thank you very much for joining the 2024 Hyperledger Mentorship run-through today. And I have the pleasure of working with Min on this presentation today, and we're going to go through and really talk about the program itself. And we're going to have some nice panel discussions. We're going to have one panel discussion that will cover the mentors and kind of what projects that they've posted out there for mentees to be able to grab a hold of and participate in the program. Then we also are going to have a nice discussion with Ankesha, who I've had the pleasure of working with as a mentee, talking about, you know, what the mentee's perspective is all about and how you can engage best as a mentee. And I think Ankesha is the perfect example of how to be a great mentee. And you know, just kind of go through this, answer any questions that you have about applying for the mentorship program. And the great thing about this is, you know, it's an international program open to everyone around the world. And there's also compensation for those mentees that are selected. And the one thing I will tell you though is even if you are not selected as a mentee, you know, Hyperledger is definitely an open community and welcomes all participation. And there's always opportunities for anyone to engage with the community on whatever framework works well for them and then be able to be a participant or a contributor or a maintainer in the Hyperledger ecosystem. So at this point, I just kind of want to talk a little bit about today I'm out at the University of Denver and we're doing what's called a tech talent run through with all of the resources throughout Colorado and trying to determine where we can attract the best talent. And so one of the things that I've talked about during the presentation here at university is, you know, there's great programs like Hyperledger offers a mentorship. And that's a way for people that, you know, maybe have not had a lot of work experience or those, you know, people that have had great work experience to really engage with the communities and then get connected with employers that are looking for that type of skill set. And when I get in here and I talk to, you know, Steven in a room about, you know, what they're doing in the community and, you know, what talent they're looking for, you'll see that any type of participation that you can have or you can engage with the people that are actively developing in that environment is really going to create opportunity. So I want everyone in this call to really take away today that this is a great way for you to upskill. And then, you know, based on that upskilling, you know, there's a lot of job opportunities. So at this point, and I want to turn it over to you. And you know, men heads up the mentorship for Hyperledger and let her go through and describe, you know, the program itself. So over to you, men. Great. Thank you, John, for the introduction. So my name is Min, I am a program manager here at the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation. And I have the pleasure of working with a great community and a great foundation. So very fortunate to have this opportunity to talk to you all about the mentorship program that I help run. So 2024 is the eighth year that Hyperledger is running this mentorship program. So Hyperledger has been really investing in this in this program year after year. So I just want to give a little background why Hyperledger keeps investing in our mentorship program. So really, you know, we have Hyperledger obviously have many projects and a large community, people working on many different things, but there's still gaps right in our future and code development in our research and documentation that we need additional people to address. So we see mentorship program is a great way to help address some of those gaps. Also mentorship program helps incubate innovative and exploratory projects. Just based on what I've seen in previous years, some of our mentorship projects actually got incubated into our Hyperledger labs because they're adding certain features and after they finish the mentorship program, they submit their projects and get approved as Hyperledger labs project. It's a great way to attract additional contributors to work on the project. So that's reason number one and all of those code that got written research that gets developed and documentation that gets developed, they are all open source and get used by all. So it's a great way to increase that contribution to all of the Hyperledger projects. Another reason why Hyperledger keeps investing in our mentorship program is it creates a pipeline to a more diverse, well-educated and well-trained contributor to pull for Hyperledger community and many organizations are looking for these talents. As John you mentioned at the beginning of this meetup program, you know, if mentees go through this program, they are going to be trained by maintainers or very active seasoned, you know, open source professionals. So we know once they go through this program, we have a pipeline to a pool of developers or contributors that are well-educated and with very good training that our community can tap into and our many organizations and companies in the blockchain or DLT ecosystem can tap into. So it's a great way to create that talent pool. And also, you know, we get lots of inquiries from, you know, lots of new developers wanting to get into our community, want to learn how to contribute. You know, there are, of course, lots of resources that we connect these contributors to, but there just seems, you know, it's a vast amount of information. Sometimes it's hard to navigate. So that's, you know, it's great that we get these inquiries, but we also, but it's hard to, you know, kind of just put them on a learning path. And we also have a lot of open source, you know, our own contributors or maintainers who are, you know, because they're in open source, they always want to teach other people how to contribute to their projects. So this mentorship program provides that framework to connect people who are eager to learn and contribute to hypoallergic projects with our existing contributors who are eager to give back to the open source community through teaching and mentoring new contributors. And then lastly, I already mentioned a little bit, it just offers a clearer path for new contributors to navigate open source culture, infrastructure and tooling and open development and open collaboration best practices. You know, even though our code is all open or documentation is all open, there are certain ways that you interact with the open community and how to use our infrastructure and tools that will make you a more effective contributor. So this mentorship program provides that clear paths for seasoned open source contributors to teach and model those best practices for new contributors. So those are some of the big reasons why hypoallergic keeps investing in this program year after year and we, so that just provides a little context. And I think John already mentioned some of these are key program elements. Obviously, this is going to be a remote program, mentees can, you can be based anywhere in the world. So it's very global. You have the flexibility to work at your home. You don't have to go to the office or anything like that, it's a remote program. It's open to globally to anyone, anyone in the world. And then we offer stipend, so it's not a salary or wage, but it's a stipend to kind of provide some incentive for mentees who do the work and who whose work is satisfactory. We also, if you look at all of our projects currently they're actually open for application on LFX mentorship and also we have more details on our wiki. If you look at those projects, you'll see all of those projects have very defined goals and learning outcomes. It just makes it a little bit more goal oriented. When you start working on these mentorship projects, you have, you know, the mentors will help you meet those learning goals and learning outcomes. Also we provide a structure to kind of help you work with the mentors to do project planning because a lot of those projects, it's like a five, six months engagement and co-working with the mentors. It's, you know, we need to break down the big project into smaller chunks and we provide some framework to help you and the mentors to do project planning. And of course, you know, these projects are proposed by hyperledger maintainers or very active contributors. And once you get selected and you will be matched up and working with these maintainers and contributors, you'll be supported and guided by them. So this is a great opportunity to work alongside with those open source professionals in the hyperledger community. We also have a framework to provide regular feedback and evaluations so that you know, okay, you know, I'm doing great in maybe some aspects, but there are ways that I can improve. So it's a great way to, you know, to receive that feedback directly from your mentors and from us, hyperledger staff to kind of keep improving your contribution. And at the end of your mentorship, you will have a lot of opportunity to write about your experience, your contributions and your learning. You'll have the opportunities to speak at hyperledger meetups or even in-person events, even at the Linux Foundation events as well, because I know a couple of our hyperledger mentees got accepted into the open source summit North America happening in Seattle next week. A couple of the hyperledger mentees will be presenting in person at that conference.  So these are kind of some of the key elements and I think also key benefits why I think, you know, many of you who are on this call should consider applying to the hyperledger mentorship program. In terms of how to apply, this is also detailed on the hyperledger week, so I put the link on the slide here, but really it's, you know, first you want to kind of think about are you eligible, right? If you're only a high school student or middle school student, probably not, because we provide a stipend, that means you have to be, you know, eligible to receive that money in the country of your residence. So we have the link on our wiki where you can review the eligibility. And also, because we have this year, we have 20 or so projects. You can only apply up to three. So you have to kind of, you know, read about those projects and think about what projects most interest you and which ones you're most qualified for and focus on three maximum to apply. And we do encourage mentee applicants to contact the mentors. So all of their email addresses and their Discord handles are visible on those projects on our wiki. So feel free to reach out to them. I know some mentors prefer that you maybe post the questions directly on Discord chat on those public channels so that, you know, when they answer your question, perhaps other people have similar questions. So there'll be, you know, it's a more efficient way perhaps to address mentee's questions. And we do require that you submit at least up-to-date resume and a cover letter. Some projects have additional application requirements, so please do read those requirements very carefully and submit the applications on LFX before the deadline of May 10th. As in this year, we set the application deadline, May 10th is the application deadline. So this is kind of the flow, how you would apply. If you have the detailed application instructions are on our wikis, so you can follow the link and check out the details. And let us know if you have any questions. We do see other questions on chat. The main thing is, men, we've been posting links for people to reach out to Roon, came up with the perfect portal for the application link. So if you want to just go and click on that, if anyone's interested, just click on that. Yep. So, oops, let me just, Roon, thank you for actually posting. I'm also going to show just our projects on the wiki. So as you can see, 2024, we have a number of 20 or so projects. And the title of the projects, the primer focus, most of our projects are going to be focused on coding. There are great many number of projects also have the documentation as a component. And some of the projects also have research as the component. All of these projects are currently accepting applications on LFX and the way how I navigate there, I go here. And so this is a portal or platform developed by the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger Foundation uses this portal and many other Linux Foundation projects and Foundation also use this portal to open their mentorship applications to accept mentee applications. As you can see, I see some CNCF projects and also RISC-5 in addition to Hyperledger. So if you're interested in, you know, applying other mentorship projects, it's all here on this portal. And I do also want to point out I was, I did talk about the application flow, but here it's also on a wiki is we have more detailed information. Your, you know, review your eligibility, look at all of all of our projects. We encourage you to contact the mentors, prepare your application materials and then apply on LFX mentorship platform. So it's pretty straightforward, at least to me, but if you have any questions, do let us know. That's it for me, John. I will pass the baton back to you. Yeah, no, thank you very much, man. And it's a wonderful run through and it's been a very successful program like you talked about for the past eight years. And I really think that the two things I'll say about the program is it's really enhanced community engagement and also enhanced contributions to the Hyperledger community. So I think both of those things really come out of this mentorship program. So men, thanks for pulling up the mentor panel. And if you want to kind of go to the next slide, that would be great. And I have three distinguished presenters today from the Hyperledger community. So I have Arun, Steven and Sarah. And all of them have really, you know, been great supporters of Hyperledger for a long time and also being able to really talk about what mentors are looking for when they post these mentorship programs and really how you can become a better contributor to the community. So it's great to catch up with all of you and what I'd like to do first is kind of go around and just have each one of you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your background in the Hyperledger community. So Arun, I'll just start with you and why don't you introduce yourself and talk about your background in the community and maybe come off and turn on video if you can so everyone can see you and interact. Hey, thanks, John. Hey, it's nice to see so many students and so many budding engineers interested in applying to mentorship program. It's been a great success and just looking at the number of proposals that we have been receiving for the past few years. So quick introduction. So I currently a staff software engineer and I work at Walmart and I've been associated with Hyperledger Foundation for close to eight years now. And it's been a great journey associating with the Hyperledger Foundation as such working on multiple projects, contributing to multiple projects and over the years also having been in multiple roles within the foundation leading multiple things. So really looking forward to the panel discussion. Yeah, Arun, and we really appreciate your community support and like you say, you've really been a key component of Hyperledger for many years. So thanks, Stephen, over to you and you know, the same atcha. I know you've been engaged with Hyperledger for years. So give us a bit of ground introduction. Yeah, I've been involved since about 2017. I'm involved in the identity and digital trust projects. So was around, Indy started those was around with the start of Aries and participate in that. My role as a, I guess, architect and community organizer around open source software, I primarily work with the government of British Columbia. My mental role is independent of that. But I do a lot of work with the government here in British Columbia where we do work on digital trust and apply these solutions. And so that's my background. I've been a mentor one time before the last session. It was extremely successful. So looking forward to talking about that. Yeah, perfect, Stephen. And that's great. And really your contributions in the identity space have been invaluable to the Hyperledger community. And I'm really looking forward to hearing more about, you know, what your projects are. Sarah, you want to come off and give an introduction and talk about your role and experience in the open source community? Sure. Thanks for having me. I have been also involved for a couple of years in the Hyperledger community. I actually started as a mentee at the very first year of the program. And the program was very rewarding. And since then, I contributed as a mentor to various projects. All of them has been successful. It was a very exciting journey for me personally. And a little bit about myself. I'm an assistant professor in computer science. And my research focuses on distributed systems. Blockchain has been always a big part of my research. I'm looking into blockchain interoperability, how we can build like trustworthy systems through blockchain technology. And different research lines, again, we focus on enhancing the technology itself and utilizing the technology in different sectors. So this being part of this Hyperledger community is a big investment for myself as well, because we always use the tools that the Hyperledger provides as a big component of our system, like testbeds and systems. And we can evaluate our ideas. So be part of this kind of community helps us to be engaged with the recent advancements and be at the top of this technology. Yeah, that's perfect, Taryn. The great thing is you're also a perfect example of how the mentorship can be a stepping stone to being really an active member of the community. And I think anyone joining the mentorship program for the 24th session is going to really see, OK, if I get into this, I can be like Sarah and then have a great element of my career around Hyperledger based on this mentorship. So perfect. OK, so let's just ask a couple of questions here. So Arun, I know you're a broad experience in the community and helping in a lot of different elements for Hyperledger. How did you get involved as a mentor? I want to talk a little bit about that and why that was part of your journey. Sure. So when we talk about open source and when we talk about open source contribution, it's all about having multiple mindsets coming together, having those multiple ideas. We put together those ideas and we brainstorm. We come up with proposals of approaches to solve a problem. So when we have a problem statement and then let's say, hey, it is always good to have this solution, but we need kind of validation to even proceed in building a large scope project around it. So for such initiatives, it always makes sense for us to have those experiments done, have those evaluations done, most of the research work and also have a documented way of running through those steps and then create an evaluation metric based on which a project could be very tried. So that was one of the motivations for why I feel I personally felt like I should get involved as a mentor within the Hyperledger Foundation. And when we first proposed the project, we had this thought process of, hey, is it good to have a connector component for blockchains, right? And I'm just giving one of the examples. So what does that connector look like? Should it have these capabilities? Then if we were to have those capabilities, who would it connect to this particular blockchain? What are the options? What options do we have over there and how do we scale it up? So we really need to spend a deliberate amount of time and effort in order to evaluate and come up with a project. And now through the mentorship program, it allows us to brainstorm these kind of problem statements with the mentee. And it allows them to experiment and learn new skills, gain new expertise over the time. At the same time, we get the evaluation out of it, right? So it was invaluable experience, invaluable exposure as a mentor. And the outcomes that mentee put up at the end, it's not just benefiting one specific project or one specific group of users. It's actually going to benefit everybody else who is interested in something. A similar problem statement. And the next step to that is the project itself is going big, like the project is growing big and the new community is formed around that particular project or the problem statement. But overall, this is the kind of motivation for why, what led me to participate as a mentor and get involved in this space. Yeah, that's perfect, Arun. And you've really been highly engaged in the mentorship program. And I also have appreciated your help in working with Aamkasha with the 2023 program, really to help her to be successful as well. So great job, Steven, you've really been a key part of hyperledger Indian Aries and what kind of brought you to be a good mentor and share your experience with these mentees that you've helped in the prior mentorship? Well, I've only done one last year and it was entirely self-centered reason. We had a real need and said, wait, there's this program out there. Let's see what we can do with it. And it really worked out well. So now I'm an ambassador for the program and pushing it everywhere and curving all the projects to join in. We had an issue, the thing about running an open source project or being a maintainer is there's always things that you know are the right things to do, but there's not enough incentive to get them done immediately. So you're building up this thing where you go, oh, if we could do that, if we had a resource we could use for that. We get this out of the benefit at the end of it, but the urgency isn't there. And so that's what we found. We had something important we needed done, super impressed with the process. With the set of applicants we had, the engagement with the selected mentee who's here today was excellent. The skills were exactly right for what we needed. And the results were outstanding. We were really, really pleased with how we were able to figure out how to do this and so that we got the benefits, but the mentee also got the benefits. And so it really worked out well. I'm really pleased to have done that and delighted to be back again this year with two more projects. Yeah, that's so wonderful to hear, Steven. And the main thing is, you know, having you as such a great contributor to the community, have that laser focused, you know, here's a project that a mentee could take on and then have the mentee have success within, you know, the Hyperledger Indie Aries ecosystem. Perfect. That's what that's what this is all about. And that's a perfect success story for the mentorship program. OK, and also, Sarah, you know, you're the perfect example of, you know, how the mentorship program can be successful as a mentee, but what drove your desire to get back in and now become a mentor for the program? Yeah, exactly. I was actually a student at Aaron mentioned that this is actually a very, like, personally satisfying to witness the progress of the mentees and support them and guide them through their professional development, enhancing their technical skills, learn complex topics and overcome, like, challenges. But this is exactly two ways to it. So for us as a mentor as well, we are provided with this great platform so we can propose our ideas as like the projects. And then we are directly involved in and all the steps of these projects from like the hiring the mentees, working with them closely. And it's a learning journey for us as a mentor as well. So we can kind of like challenge our assumptions. We learned as the mentee is growing. And it's like the constant development journey for us as well. So this, like, I couldn't imagine a better like a platform to to contribute to them, to the community, actually. Perfect. Yeah, that's great. And it's wonderful to hear and kind of on a follow up to that, too, is and this all open up to the three of you and just whoever wants to jump in would be great. Do any of you have a firsthand experience with someone that came into a mentorship program like Hyperledger Mentorship Program here? And it really was a springboard for their career. And I guess even as a springboard for the career, I'll say, allowed them to even get engaged with the community and stay as a community participant after the mentorship. Does that make sense? Yeah, I got. Go ahead, Steven. I actually, I was going to say I wish I had this opportunity. I certainly didn't back when I began my career and would have loved to have had it, but definitely didn't. You know, I had mentors over my time, but never anything formal and ever a program. Sarah, you have much better, much more. After your experience. Yeah, exactly. Actually, for myself, so when I started like the first year, it was I was still in the middle of my PhD. And then I got involved in an open source like development and the whole Hyperledger community. So, like, definitely, my mentors was a great support for me. They gave me actually and support in any way, technical support or like the professional development. They still the confidence in me that how I can actually contribute and get back to this community and mentors other projects and throughout the time, actually, all of the projects that I have worked with this amazing actually mentees, I witnessed that how like they were like passionate about like the project objectives, how they they really wanted to make sure that it's it's it's perfect in all the ways. And it's actually many of them were like graduate students. So at the same time, they were like graduating and then fulfilling their, for example, master degree program. And at the same time, participating in this internship program. And then they moved and jumped to their new career journey after that. So being part of like witnessing their growth and development and their success was was always like amazing, actually. I can maybe I don't do it right. So personally, as as Steven said, like when I was a student, probably like I did not have much opportunities like the way we have now. But it doesn't bar like other people from mentoring from mentoring me. Right. So I didn't have a great set of mentors and at least within Hyperledge Foundation itself, I consider some of the project maintainers to be great mental when you interact with them, when you start your core contributions, when you get involved in some of the meetings and do design discussions, the kind of insights that they provide that allows a great step into into your career. And speaking specifically about beneficiary of the Hyperledge Foundation mentorship program, at least I know for the last three years that I've been mentoring each of the main three that has passed in this program. They have had their career kickstarted within blockchain technology. Like they wanted to get involved and gain insights. We have Aukanksha as well on the call, right? So her success story can be considered as well. So she was a mentee and now she is a mentor. So that shows the the signs, the kind of development that the mentees have in the program and the kind of graph that we can see in the career growth. Yeah, that's perfect. And Arun and Steven, both, you know, you mentioned that you didn't really have this type of program when you were doing your initial career development. And I really think that, you know, that's the benefit of this mentorship is it gives you that stepping stone. And even at this session I'm attending at the University of Denver right now, the whole thing is all about, you know, how can people get engaged in the tech community and grow their career and opportunities like a mentorship is a perfect way to really have that stepping stone. So kind of going back here. And I guess, Sarah, I'll start with you on this time is what do you think the mentees will get out of participating in the Hyperledger mentorship program? And this can be, you know, whether that's engagement, whatever framework you want to put that into, what do you think they would get out of the program here? Yes, there are multiple actual benefits, valuable experience that they can get out of this program. They can work closely with the experts in the Hyperledger projects and blockchain in general, they can get a continuous feedback on their work and they can enhance their technical skills. They will be involved in a big community. So their professional network will be expanded, they will be able to get support out of like this particular project, but also be involved with like the other like advanced topics and the projects that exist within the open source community. They're from the professional development, how they can communicate the idea, how they can implement their idea, how they can present their ideas is an important step for them for move on to their next career journey. So all of them, I would say that it's a very beneficial for them. Perfect. And Rune, what's your thought on what the mentees will get out of their participating in the mentorship here? I would say it's all the win-win situation here for a mentee, right? So let's start with like if we were to box those in categories. So of course, like mentees will get exposure to blockchain technology, they get to know latest happening, so within within budding technology and they get to know in terms of blockchain works and all those benefits are packed along and either it's blockchain or identity ecosystem and whatever work project, work stream, they get involved within the Hyperledger Foundation. Now, I would say the real game changer points for at least for somebody who is a student and they're looking to get started into their career, looking for an opportunity for gaining exposure, right? For those people, I think it's an opportunity for them to work with some of the best minds in the industry.  They can debate and they even participating in, let's say, 15 minutes of debate with them can be really insightful for somebody who is planning to get involved and somebody who wants to grow their career. Now, this being one part of it, the next part of it as as a student, we are all accustomed to like taking assignments and maybe working on those assignments. And when we switch into working in a work stream, let's say in our careers or some workplaces, we take some buffer time off to get adjusted. Like we have to come up with ways of working. We have to come up with the achievable, like deliverable items. And then how do we go about from requirements mapping to creating user stories and working on them and delivering them, showcasing the value. This is also one more work stream or like the kind of work process that gets involved, that's another benefit for the mentee. So they get this all first hand exposure through this program. Now, I also want to emphasize one more benefit that all the mentees gain. It's open source involvement is unlike any other involvement, any other mentorship or internship programs that you get involved in. So the reason I would say is let's say if you go to a workplace, so maybe you learn a new technology, you get involved in a project, you work on it, so your exposure is limited to people around you. But when you start working in open source technology, the exposure you get is not bound to one area, one geography or like one organization or like one project area.  So anybody can come in and they can suggest things around and you are interacting with not just people from like one background or one diverse, there's so much diversity involved in gaining knowledge and gaining expertise. And I would say that it's really important early on in the career so that it expands your thought process, it expands the way you think, the way you apply solutions to any problems that are post active. Yeah, that's an excellent run through Rune. And I really appreciate that. And I think that gives a lot of good insight to any of the potential and mentees coming on the call here has really what they would get out of the program. So Stephen, over to you as a core maintainer, what would you say that the mentees would get out of the hyperledger mentorship program? You are probably on mute. Yes, Steven, you're probably just on mute real quick. Sorry about that. The great ideas and comments from Sarah and Arun, they've covered most of it. The things I'll add is you get a definitive project and a goal that is doable, but challenging. If it was easy, we would have done it. So it's not easy, but it is doable. We thought through it enough to say, oh, this is something that's realistic. So it's really hard to come to a project and just say, oh, I'm going to start with this issue and just jump into it. So that's one benefit. I think Arun touched on this, but I'll make it more concrete. Your GitHub handle now will have a bunch of real contributions to it and you're building your reputation that you can take anywhere to show them what you've done, not just that you've cloned a repository or forked a repository, but you've actually made substantial contributions and they can look at those contributions and see exactly what you've done. I think that's really important. And then the last thing is things like this meetup where, as a mentee, you have a platform to talk about what you've accomplished with people who are delighted with what you've accomplished and willing to promote it with you. So it's very helpful in that way as well. So those are my additional thoughts. Yeah, Stephen, and that's wonderful. And I think that gives everyone a good indication of why it's so important to be a part of the mentorship program. And I also think exactly what you're saying is, you know, this public code that they could put out there or public contributions that they can make to the hyperledger community. Anybody who's an employer looking to hire is going to go back and say, oh, well, you worked with, you know, Stephen or Sarah or Rune. And lo and behold, this is a contribution to the community.  Yeah, as a developer, your GitHub handle and being able to just proudly send it to someone and say, hey, take a look at my work. That's pretty neat. I agree, Stephen. That's brilliant. I agree with you 100 percent. OK, perfect. And I'm going to do one more question here, which is kind of a combined wrap up question for the mentorship side. So, Sarah, I'm going to start with you. And it's kind of a what do you look for in mentee applicants that we think would be successful contributors to the hyperledger community and then be just as far as, you know, what would you kind of pitch is why somebody who's joined this call today as a potential mentee would want to be a part of this program? Yeah, regarding like the successful applicant and the way that we do the selections. So typically every project has as a different requirement, technical requirement, it's used based on different platforms. So there are some like general knowledge and a solid foundation on like how like what is the blockchain systems? How like it works, what's kind of like a good understanding of like the whole concept in general, in addition to the specific requirements, a technical requirement of the project. For example, for our ongoing project, which at this moment we are accepting applicants that we are working with two different blockchain platform hyperledger fabric and the substrate like framework. It's always difficult to find like the perfect applicant in terms of technical who has experience with all the requirements of the project. But some of the like the component of the project have an experience with those component is like making an applicant a good candidate. But there are like other factors as well. So we usually looking for the applicants who are really passionate about like this projects. It's more than just like being an inter being having an interest because most of these projects are technically challenging and requires some sort of like the passion and patience to overcome this and this kind of like challenges and make sure that they can succeed and complete the objectives of the projects. So that's that's mainly being a great team members. It's like distributed team. So being a great like the team members and is another key factor for applicants to be successful. I actually forget what was your second part of your question? Yeah, I think you did such a superior job of just articulating the first point. The second point was just if you have any just short pitch as to, you know, someone's joined the call, they're a potential mentee and they're hearing from all these great mentors. You're self included. Why would they want to sign up and participate? Yeah, so again, the main reason would be like all the benefits that the mentees can gain out of this program. So some of this project might directly resonate with the particular mentees. That was actually the case for me when I first started as a mentee because one of these project was exactly they're contributing to my PhD thesis as well. So it was like a very good fit for me. I know like applicants can apply up to four projects. So there is like different teams or different projects that they can look into. But they can they they will get a lot of benefits that we just mentioned in the previous actual discussions out of this program. Enhancing their technical skills. Expanding their knowledge and benefit from great mentorship of this program, work with excellent team members and expanding and enhancing their professional developments and in carriers and their CV in general. Perfect. Thanks, Sarah. Really appreciate that. And Rune, I'm going to jump back over to you and say, you know, what do you look for in mentee applicants that you think would make them successful contributors and then, you know, give your quick pitch for anyone who's joined the call, why they said apply and go in for one of these mentorships. Thanks, John. I think you're making me a person who pitches and gets more mentorship proposals. So I mean, why not? Right. So when we have spoken about so many benefits that the mentee will gain out of this program. So if if I were a student and if I were looking for an opportunity to get involved, to make a difference in the world and to add those credentials against my GitHub handler and I'm just somebody who wants to get started in my career. Right. So I would see this as the best opportunity that is just out there and for me to grab. And I would do all possible in my hand to go and apply and build that impression or like make the best efforts to even get selected to the face. So having said that, I want to speak about as a mentee what makes the difference, right? So there are so think about from mentors standpoint. So let's say let's say I have a project. I mean, I do have a project this year as well. So let's say I am receiving maybe I'm just not quoting the numbers. Like not the number is not supposed to be considered as the total number of applications that each project will receive. But just for quoting sake, right? So let's say we receive about 50 applications per mentor per program or per project, right? So as a mentor, I will have about maybe like one week or maybe one and a half weeks of time to shortlist and make sure who's the best among them so that I can work with them. And the goal is to to gain to make the best efforts to select the mentee and also gain all the things that we wanted out of the mentorship program into the project to make that contribution into the project. So from a mentor standpoint, it is really difficult if your application is too generic or too vague, right? So I think you also mentioned, Sarah also mentioned that in a way, it's not just about interest. It's also about showcasing your passion. So I would say during your application process make sure you spend sufficient amount of time in how you formulate your profile. So building a resume is a prerequisite, right? For all the projects and building a cover letter is a prerequisite. I would say model your cover letter and talk about why. So sure you can talk about, let's say maybe a paragraph about your journey and what makes you unique among others. But if possible, what are some of the great proposals that I've seen in the past is does spend their time in thinking about what they think is the problem statement, what they think can be done to solve the problem statement. So if I'm choosing a specific project to apply, then I would spend time on it. I would say, hey, this is my approach to solve the problem. Or this is what I think about the problem. And that gives somebody who is filtering your profiles an opportunity to know that as you're involved, making an attempt to understand what the problem is, it makes them think like it is easy for them to work with you. And some of the projects do come with additional requirements. For instance, this year specifically, I'm like requesting people if they can describe the problem statement. So this is one of the way through which it's not just for the mentorship program, right? It's also helpful in your career as well when you start building solutions. It's not about the solution. What matters the most is how do you design it? And in order for you to design the best solution, and how do you understand the problem? How do you analyze the problem? That becomes the crucial step. So I'm probably making an attempt for all the applicants who are applying to the project, asking them if they can write a short summary maybe within 500 words, describing a problem that they have solved, not necessarily the project of the proposal for which they're applying. So once they pass through the filtering criteria, there could be some selection criteria. If there are more number of qualifying applicants, maybe mentors prefer to talk one-on-one. They would organize a regular interview as such, right? So make sure you are available during that time. Now let's say you got into the program, you got selected. What's the next thing that you do? It's always consider that, I also saw some questions that people are asking on the Zoom chat about spending time with the mentors, So consider this as an opportunity for the next three to six months, you have mentors committed to you. You have a mentor who is available to you at your disposal. So how you make their time utilized is up to you. So go ahead and schedule regular cadence calls. Go ahead and propose what you want as a regular cadence calls and tell them that, hey, this is how my schedule looks like for the next few months. And this is my availability and I would propose that we sync up or maybe you tell me what task to achieve and we both come up with a project execution plan. And this is how we track the deliverable at the end of it, right? So show that initiative, show that enthusiasm, show that you are interested in the project. At the end, whatever you are going to build through the mentorship program, it's your baby, you're going to carry it forward. And it's not just your baby in the sense, since it is being done in open source, you have to make sure additional contributions do come in. So treat it as something that you built and make it successful, make it a thing that you want your friends to start contributing to, you want people from across the globe wanting to contribute to what you have built. So that gives you another level of expertise which you don't gain generally in your workplaces, right? So yeah, this is my advice to somebody who's applying and having said all this, if I were a student, again, I'll repeat, why not? I would go and apply now if I had an opportunity. Arun, that's brilliant. Thanks for that exceptional run through. And I think all of that expertise and advice is well received by the attendees here and it really gives them a roadmap for what they should do next, which is namely apply for one of the mentorships that's posted in that platform. So Stephen, I'm gonna wrap up with you and ask you the same questions here to run through. What are you looking for in the mentee applicants?  Yeah, I think just briefly my thoughts on top of what's been said is just pick projects that align with what you already do. I have done, you can't in the next two weeks or three weeks gain all the experience you need to start on a new project. So pick the right projects that align with your background and then provide verifiable information in your application to show what you've done that would contribute, that would enable you to be the best contributor to the project. So I talked earlier about your GitHub handle and show what you've done. You can't do that in the next 15 days to have real data, but if you already have that, absolutely showcase it. I think that's the main thing related background. There's a question right now that someone's asking about, oh, I have a background in medical biotechnology, how do I do it? Your key there is to find one that most likely fits it, and there may not be one of those, but maybe there is, but try to align it to something that you've done and that you have experience in and that you will be successful, that you can show you will be successful in. As far as why to do it, it's just so many benefits coming out of it, including, as I say, exposure and experience and jobs, very simple. Perfect, yeah, jobs, that's a good career development. You hit the nail on the head with that, Steven. Exactly. Yep, okay, perfect. Well, that's brilliant too. Steven, thanks for all that insight, and I really wanna thank Arun, Steven and Sarah for joining the call today, and they will be available as much as they can to respond to questions in the chat. I really wanna be respectful of everyone's time here. We have Ankesha, which I had the pleasure of having as my mentee for 2023, and she did such a wonderful job as a mentee, and now she's going to do the hosting of the panel discussion for the mentees, and then if we have any time left, which we may not at the end, then maybe we can go for just questions directly, but I'm gonna turn it over to Ankesha now, and Ankesha, take it away from here. Hello, hi, John. Am I orderly? Welcome. Yep, you're loud and clear, Ankesha. Okay, great. So, hello everyone, myself, Akanksha Rani, and I am from India, and I am currently an upcoming software engineering intern at Microsoft, and I have been part of Hyperledgers in 2023, and I have had the privilege of working with John, and my other two mentors, and with Min as my program manager, everything was so smooth, and along with that, getting help from such great mentors like Arun and Bobby, it was a very beautiful journey for me, because it was not just an internship experience, but also like making a connection with people worldwide. So it's very beautiful for me to be present here and speak about my journey. So I'll start with myself here, like how did I get to know about Hyperledger, and then I like to know about the experiences of other mentees along with me, co-mentees for 2023, and get to know about their experiences as well. So for me, when I entered into the space of open source in 2022 through a hacktoberfest, it's a big scale program. So I got to know that we can contribute to different projects, and we can understand like how things take place in the open source world, and I was exposed to open source by that. So I was very interested in working in some program. So I was looking for different programs, like Google Summer of Code, and actually there are multiple programs in the industry. So I was looking for different programs, and with that, while I was exploring, I got to know about Hyperledger and LFX, and it was, I think so, the best part of all the exploring was that I got to know about not just Hyperledger, but all the different organizations under LFX. So it was not the learning about one organization, but I got to know about different organizations. And John, should I answer the question that is listed and then move forward to different mentees, or how should I take that thing? I think what I would do is, as you can ask the mentees those questions, that would be great, and also weigh into it as your own perspective, because you did such a great job with the programs. So I would say, cover the questions, but also give your experience as well. Sure, sure. So surely, so first of all, I'll just give a brief introduction about my journey, and then I'll move forward to different mentees for their experiences, that would be a better option for me. So how did I discovered about the program? So as I said that I was exploring for open source opportunities in there, and then by exploring, I got to know about that Hyperledger is there, which introduces us to blockchain technologies. Even if we are beginners, it's a very good organization which gets exposure in blockchain technologies. So I reached out to my mentors, John and my other mentors, Niko, and I also had one more mentor. So I reached out to them so that I can get to know about how to engage with the community. So they sent me the calls, there's a page dedicated for just call details. So for Hyperledger, so we have weekly calls in there, their mentees can get to know about the different projects and one-to-one connect with the mentors and different program managers, and it is a very good way for interacting and making networks. So I joined those calls before the application deadline for around for one month, I tried to give some contribution from my side, give my ideas, and how am I planning to work for the project? So that was how I was preparing myself in the beginning for applying to the program. So after that, when I talk about my contributing experiences, so in that my project was based on front end and UI UX design, other than that, we also had documentation research work. So it was a combination of a lot of things in there. So my project name was Hyperledger on onboarding and my mentor was John, another two mentors in there. And I worked upon the different UI UX aspects and mostly on the research part where I was responsible for integrating different popular YouTube videos of Hyperledger in the official page of Hyperledger. And I tried my best to incorporate them in the start here guide and incorporate the different popular videos of Hyperledger which is not visible to the people who come to the Hyperledger page for the first time. So that was how I was basically smoothing the process for different first time users, whether they are contributors, whether they're maintainers, whether they're business persons. So that was my job basically. And when I come about my learning experiences, as I said, so it was not just limited to the internship. From that internship, I got to know how to work with people in different time zones. So that was the best learning for me that I'm sitting in India here and I'm working with a time zone with a person sitting at different part of the world. And that was one of the best learnings. And other than that, I have got to know about so many technologies existing. I got to, my technical skills were enhanced because I took some help from Arun also in different related problems. So everything was improving day by day as my six month journey went through. So after that, how did the experience related to my professional and academic goals for this question, I would say that it has extremely impacted both my life, both professional and academic because when I talk academically, so this program was included in my academic subject and I even got to, I was able to get credits for this. They find it, Min wrote my letter of recommendation and I'm very grateful to her for that. And for that, after that, it was not limited to credits. In my professional life, I used to learn first and then apply things in life. So with this program, I understood that you can even by mentoring people, you can grow yourself. So I started helping people out the way I got help from my mentors. So I started mentoring people in different technologies and open source and encourage them to join program, hyper ledger program and different LFX programs and different open source programs. So that was how I was growing day by day, not just by focusing on my skills but also helping out others in the process. And that had helped me a lot by building my professional connection because it became very strong. After this program, a lot of people had reached out to me. So because of that, I got that professional identity in there that yes, I have done something and people really look forward to me to understand the program. So the last question is like any advice that I would love to share in the interested people who are joining. Like I've got a lot of requests in there for guidance for this program and I've helped people out for whom I could but I have received a lot of requests. So everyone who's watching this program right now and everyone who's looking forward to contribute. First of all, no matter whether you get selected or not officially in this program, you should definitely contribute in there. That would be my first suggestion because I remember with my experience I was not just working on one project. I was definitely selected for one under John but I was also working on another project with Arunima as a mentee. That project was a hyper ledger documentation and I tried my best to contribute in that project also because it was so interesting working with different technologies and learning about new things. So even though that project, I was not officially registered as a mentee for that project but I was doing that parallely. So with that experience, I can say that even though you're not officially selected and you're not getting paid for something, you definitely the learnings that you get are a word for joining in the community. So that would be my first suggestion. Secondly, when it comes to the application process I just feel that if you get engaged with the community the earlier phase of like one to two months before the application deadline which is going on right now. So in that phase you can understand the program better and you can understand that how you will contribute in next six months. So even the mentors in there, they join in call and you can connect with them and get to know what exactly they're expecting. Like right now we had so many mentors and they're on the panel who told that these are requirements and we are looking forward for these things but if you join the calls in there and you try to understand like what exactly is the project specifically looking for that would be very beneficial for the applications. And the last thing that I would say after all this that the mentor learnings, the program learnings and the exposure to people worldwide all these experiences are more than the stipend that we are getting in there. Definitely stipend is a very good factor that it helps us to encourage that we should work upon and the work is recognized by the organization. stipend just depicts that. But other than that, the experiences that you'll gain would be there with you forever in this lifetime and like I right now will be interning as a software engineer in Microsoft. So the experiences that I gained here definitely helped in there in my interviews and there in the other companies. So that is another factor that has helped me a lot. And yeah, so that is the thing that I would like to, that was all that I wanted to share. And other than that, if any one of you feel wants to reach out to me for any sort of help I would love to help you out in any other way. So I'll move forward to Aritra Baduri for the next introduction about himself and how his journey took place and how did, how can I request him to answer all these questions? Over to you, Aritra. Hello, everyone. I am Aritra Baduri. I have been working as a mentee in high colleges in the last year. So I had worked under Stephen in the High Collegiate Analytics Project where I had completed the existing Anubis version 1 protocol and documented and reviewed the existing code bases. And along with that, I have checked the white papers and made sure that all of the documentation code base and the white paper aligned and that more or less connected and sufficient for any one who wants to create their own implementation of Hyperlegia. So that's what my work rewards. Coming to the question of how did I discover the program? So when I was in my college, so I'm currently in college in my third year. So when I was in second year, I got to know about one of our seniors who was also a graduate of the LFX mentorship program at Hyperlegia. So he was a few years senior to us and I reached out to him on LinkedIn as he graduated few years ago from our college. I talked with him and he told me that it is a very good program. He should apply if you're interested. I was interested in open source for a long period of time. I had tried to work on open source projects. I have been even making some small contributions to some simple projects that are available in GitHub. So that's how I started getting to know about the LFX mentorship program at Hyperlegia. So gradually when the application time opened one of my friends told me that they were also applying. So we all applied together. And after that, the process went on and the applications got shortlisted and retrieved. That's how I discovered and got selected in the program. So coming on to my learnings from this program. So one of the most important things one can get to learn from a mentorship program is to know how the open source community works. So the open source community is a vast community. And if you're interested in open source then in one way or another, you need to interact with the community. You will have to take help from the community. You'll have to help the community back. And that's how the open source communities work. So this also implies that you need to interact with the industry expert professionals that are already in Hyperlegia. Learn from them, get their valuable experience and become a better developer along the way. So this also means that we'll learn good open source practices. How to write code, how to maintain the code, how to make the code ready for production, how to write appropriate protocol specifications, which might work involved. So apart from that, there are also things like meeting the deliverables that are required within the time frames overcoming the challenges that might happen during the project. So that's all I have learned from the project and interacting with the mentors also gave me a helping hand and they guided me in a lot of ways to help with the community at home. Complete the project that I had. So that's how I would say that open source helps us. Coming to the third question, how does the experience lead to the professional academic goals? So the most important thing one can learn from such a mentorship program is to get industry connections. So this is one of the most important things and getting industry connections is very much useful for any professional in the world. And using these connections, they can grow later in the career and can make opportunities meet with people and all of that stuff can happen. So you can learn good practices of the industry. Apart from that, the Elefx mentorship it is a very important place to, and a very nice platform to showcase your talent to the world. So you have the passion to build something you want to create an impact. So come on here and start to contribute in the open source projects. You will help the entire world who are using the projects and you will be helping the entire community out. So that's how, so coming to the last question about advice that I can share with the prospective mentees. So I would say that you should select projects that align with your strengths. So I have seen many people who apply in programs where they just somehow pick some projects randomly hoping that they will get selected and fill the application. So I would say that don't do something like that, select the project, read about the project. I would suggest that every hyper-ledged project has their mention in the website. They have this code channel to try to understand what the project is about and try to understand who are the people working there and try to understand if it aligns with your skills. So that's how you can find a good project. So you can go to the list of the projects and look out for that. And then I would suggest that you should express your interest to the mentor. So you can communicate with the mentor on various platforms like in the emails or Discord. So I would suggest to express your interest and even in drafting your resume or cover letter, you must write it in a way that it experiences your passion, it expresses your passion and your interest that yes, I am capable and I am different from all that. So that is one of the major factors that play our role. Apart from that, yes, getting in touch with the mentor beforehand helps. And even if you are putting in a mail or you are just putting some queries out or having a conversation with the mentor on Discord channels. So all of these helps. Apart from that, I would suggest to write a resume that focuses on your strengths, that focuses on your strengths that are relevant to the project and that is how you can create a positive impact on the mentors who are evaluating your application. So that's all from my side. Thank you for listening. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Sorry, yeah. It's on. Kousha, you want to get Kousha? Hi, hi, everyone. I'm very glad to be here. I'm Kousha. I'm a Master's student in University of Manitoba and my research revolves around blockchain and mainly blockchain interoperatability. And I was honored to be a mentee in the previous year program. And now I will try to share my experience with you as much as I can, and I hope it would be beneficial for you. Well, I came across this project through my supervisor. As I said, I'm working in a blockchain lab. Actually, it's a distributed system lab, but we mainly work on blockchain. So this program was suggested to me by my supervisor, and I applied for that. And I mean, I learned a lot during this program, especially about contributing to an open source project, because, you know, you can learn contribution to open source projects in two ways. You're either going to have your own repository to which you can learn how to maintain a repository in a professional way, and how can you write documents for that so people can understand your project. Or you're going to open a pool request on, I mean, an already existed Hyperledger project, and you're going to resolve the issues that the maintainer is going to have on your pool request, and you're going to learn a lot from them, because the maintainers in the Hyperledger products and the mentors are, I mean, they are really professional, and you can check their GTOPS or their, like, research papers, and you know, you can see that how professional they are, and you can learn from them. About my, about the relation with the academic or professional profile, well, it can definitely boost the both career and academic profile, probably, especially for me, because, you know, well, I'm a blockchain researcher, and being in this program gave me, like, a lot of experience, and I mean a lot of practical experience, because when you are in the academia, you sometimes are just indulge yourself in the papers, and you probably, I mean, it's possible for you to, you know, to just be far from having a practical experience, but this program can give you, I mean, a very, very practical experience, and you can actually apply whatever you know in blockchain in a real professional, industrial-level project. And, well, regarding the advice for the mentees, well, I definitely suggest you to go to all the projects, read the description thoroughly, and read the skills that are needed for the project, and choose a project based on your personal interests and also based on your plans for the future. I mean, you cannot learn a lot from your mentors and it cannot be a great experience for you, so make sure that the program will serve you for your future plans. And, you know, to me, applying for this position is not really, I mean, it's somehow similar for applying for a job, so you should definitely work on your resume and your cover letter and try to bold your skills, but you should avoid over exaggeration about your skills because, well, it depends on your mentor, but I myself, I had an interview with my mentors in addition to my resume and my cover letter, so you need to somehow defend what you are asserting in your resume. So don't over exaggerate your skills, but tell the absolute truths, and if you have a skill, just don't be ashamed to bold it. And, yes, that's all that comes to my mind. If there is any question, I'm out here answering. Hakeshaw, you want to go to the final mentee panelist? Let's just see if... Hi. Nayan, can you jump on? Yes. Am I audible? Yes, you sound great. Okay, so hi, everyone. I'm Nayan, and I was a mentee in the Hyperledger program in the last session. So, yeah, I'm about to share about my experience. So, an introduction about me. I am, well, you could say basically a nobody. I don't have any formal education in computer science. I've been learning through blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, and all the good stuff, sometimes just browsing through GitHub and looking through open source code to try to learn how people actually make wonderful software. So, learning through these various ways and building my skills, I've been doing this for a while, but how do you actually know what you know? You need to apply it, and you need to know what else is there to know, to be able to work in the industry. So, since I had been using a lot of free software, I wanted to work in something that is open source. I had heard about GSOC from somewhere, that's the Google's open source software program, and so I was looking for what other options are there. So, I just put it in search, open source mentorship projects, and I found Hyperledger mentorship on a blog. It was among a list of others. Now, there were some others that I found, like GSOC, Igalia, Outreachy. By the way, you should look into all these two, whoever is applying. These are good projects. And, yeah, Outreachy opens in August, by the way. So, like after this application is done, don't be sad if you don't get into this. There's more open source mentorships out there. Okay, so, coming to Hyperledger. So, I saw Hyperledger on this blog, and then I started looking into, okay, what is Hyperledger? I haven't heard of this before. And as I looked into the Wikipedia of Hyperledger and just started researching, I saw, hey, they have Linux Foundation backing. That seems good. Like, this seems like a legit and nice project. And so, I went into their list of projects, and I really did like a few. Some of them really felt approachable and within my interest zone. I was interested in Rust at the time, and I did see some projects that were related. And you might find something of interest. There's a wide variety of projects in the Hyperledger list. So, do take a look. Someone has already shared the link to the project list. So, skim the links, open anything that catches your interest. And I'll give you one trick. If there's a project that you do like, go on YouTube and just search for the project, Hyperledger, and the project name. You'll find many meeting videos. That is like all of these projects, they regularly meet. And the recordings for these meetings are available on YouTube. So, without even starting the project, you can actually get a feel for how work goes on in that project. So, that's one way you can get to know about which projects you want to work on. So, I would like to give one suggestion here. Go through the listings right now. Don't wait for the last moment to apply. I'm one of those that waits until the last moment to apply. So, I can totally empathize there. But you probably won't be able to go through all of these projects. They're detailed. They have mentions about the requirements, what is expected, what the project is about. And you won't be able to go through all of them in one go. So, schedule some time to research about these projects and select one or two that you're really passionate about. So, yeah. I selected the ones that I was passionate about and I did a lot of research about them and then I applied. Perfect. Thanks for those insights. And get away to say a little more. Yes. So, let me come to what you can learn about contributing to open source through this mentorship. So, one thing I found is that developers love meetings and live discussions. When you go through GitHub discussions and mailing lists, it might seem that open source developers are solitary creatures who only interact through code and long technical messages and stuff like that. But that's not true. There's a variety of ways in which for open source project members communicate and whatever your favorite mode of communication is, there's probably a project that does that. So, in my previous mentorship, which was without reaching, the primary mode of communication was IRC. IRC is Internet Relay Chat and that thing is even older than the first HTML website. Other projects these days use things like Matrix and other chat platforms. And as you may have found out already, Hyperledger has a Discord. How cool is that? So, like, however you want to get in touch with these open source developers, you can do that. So, please do. Some devs in the Hyperledger community even have fair programming live stream sessions. There's a link in the chat regarding calendar of public meetings. In that, you can take a look and you'll find that some project members actually have live, a pair coding sessions. So, anyone can just hop in, ask questions and put together with someone that's already experienced. What I'm trying to say is, in open source, there's no one way to collaborate. And this is something that you learn through this mentorship and you can also, of course, self-learn this. What's important is the spirit of collaborating and building on each other's work. And of course, to give credit to everyone that's involved and contributed in the journey. Open source is putting your code out there and inviting people to build upon it and improve it. Like Arun said, you're building something that you want others to contribute to. This is something that became extra clear by working on this mentorship because the way in which my mentors, like, they were very inviting in my contributions. Like, they wanted me, they wanted to enable me to be able to contribute to the project. And I'm sure most of the other mentees also share this experience. In any open source project, people want you to contribute. So you shouldn't be afraid to, you know, just help in whatever way you can. You're there to learn as well as to give something. Correct. Let's go ahead and we're coming up on the bottom of the hour here. And I really appreciate all of your insight here. But I want to give a couple of minutes here to really go through and revisit this. Ankesha, great job on running that mentee panel. I really appreciate it. I want to thank all of the mentors for joining us today to give their insights and also to really participate in the meeting chat that was going on and answering all the questions that were coming through. And there was a huge amount of questions that were answered and we really appreciate it. The final thing that I'd like to do here is to turn it back over to Min for final thoughts that she has around the mentorship and also let her talk a little bit about if you need to get a hold of anyone regarding the mentorship, how to best do that. So Min, I'm going to put it back over to you for the final close out here. Yeah, thank you, Jong. Thank you everybody for joining today's session. Special shout out, of course, to all the mentors. Arun and Stephen and one more, I'm forgetting. Sarah, yes. Thank you for sharing your great insights and for mentees. Thank you for sharing your experience. And I know Kusha, you already proposed your project to be a hyperledger lab. So coming out of your contribution from last year. And I think, Nayan, you are maybe one of the core contributors now for ARIES. So thank you for sharing that experience and also Kunksha. And thank you for doing all the work, working with Jong. And thank you very much for your continued contributions to hyperledger. And yeah, if you have any questions, please do get in touch. If your questions are very generic about our application, about the program in general, just email mentorship at hyperledger.org, hyperledger foundation staff will answer those questions. If you have very specific technical questions, yes, we do encourage you to reach out to the mentors, but be thoughtful about your questions. And also they do encourage you to ask those questions on the public Discord channels as well so that your questions can be seen by other mentee applicants who are interested in applying to this program as well. Once again, the application deadline is May 10th. So please do submit your application materials and we'll fix mentorship platform and we look forward to receiving your applications. Great. Thanks, Min. Thanks everyone for attending and we look forward to seeing the application come through. Have a wonderful day and we'll call it good. Thank you, Jong. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, David for hosting as well.


So this was the first study which told us that longer content matter. But we saw some contrary information in hrefs. hrefs is a tool that you use for doing your SEO. What is that contrary information? Almost 2 out of every 3 searches on google are either 4 words or more. Right? And typically these 4 words are more. What are these? Typical. These are long tail keywords. Right? We all know that. Or long tail keyword ke upar how can you write 3000 words, 4000 words, 10000 word articles? That's difficult. There was more evidence to this study. This is a distribution of keywords versus their search volume. 92% of keywords get 10 or less searches per month. 92% of google keywords searches get 10 or less searches per month. What does this tell you? That's 1.9 billion keywords 92% get less than 10 searches per month. What does that tell you? That tells us number 1 that keywords are extremely varied. Long before birth, google was looking at prepositions. Google was looking at search intent. Google was looking at the geography where the user was searching these keywords for. And everyone types in their keywords differently. Right? That's why majority of the keywords that you see get less than 10 searches. If we all search a keyword here, we will do it in different ways. Not the same way. That is why they get less than 10 searches per month. Right? So what's the solution to all of this? The solution is cornerstone content. Right? And in order to create cornerstone content, I want you to take this one thing away with you. The way we have been thinking about our content strategy, the structure of our content, website, blog, whatever. And the way we create our content needs to change immediately if you have not done it already. Right? What do I mean by that? So, so far what we have been doing, keyword search किया, depending on how good you are at keyword search, you found some keywords. And then you took that keyword, wrote an article. If you are a true content marketer, you distributed it well, got traffic from social media, पैसा है तो Facebook ad भी किया. Right? And if your content piece was really good, maybe it went viral, maybe you became famous. Right? This is how we used to do our content marketing so far. Unfortunately, writing keyword based content is going to change now. This is no longer going to help you get into the top 10 places of Google. Okay? So cornerstone content will help you overcome this challenge. Right? What is cornerstone content? Let's go back 30 years, 40 years. Let's say you are a business then. And let's say someone wants to buy from you. What would that person would have to do? Let's say someone wanted a swimming pool installed in their backyard and you were a swimming pool company. What would that person have to do? That to visit your store or factory.  They will have thousands of questions about swimming pools. क्या ताइप के होते है? क्या कोस्त होता है? कितना दूरेबलीटी होता है? मेंटेनन्स क्या होता है? They will have thousands of questions. Right? Some you might not have thought of. चिल्रन के लिए सेथ होता है क्या? बच्छो के लिए सेथ होता है क्या? Many questions. What municipal corporation permissions will I have to take? So many questions would crop up in their mind. Right? And you would sit there and patiently explain that to them. That's what cornerstone content is. Right now, the way we create our content is infinite. अगर किसी वेट्साइत के लिए मेरेगो क्यान्त बनाना है? Is there an end to where I stop creating content? Till I start, till I keep finding new keywords, I'll keep creating content. Simple. Right? But with cornerstone content, it's not like that. You only need to answer the questions that people have. Right? That's what cornerstone content. It is no longer about keyword, it is about the topic, swimming pool के वारे में? Swimming pool कैसे बनाना है? उसके वारे में?  It is no longer about swimming pools in Mumbai. A swimming pool constructors in Mumbai. It is about voice search. How do I get a swimming pool installed in my backyard? How much does a swimming pool cost? It's all about questions. Do you understand the difference? It's all about the topic. So that's what cornerstone content is. कोरनास्टों कंटेंट is the most basic, indispensable, essential piece of content on your website, which answers all the questions your customers will have about your product. Right? And it is all about the topic that your product answers for. The problems that your product solves. कोरनास्टों कंटेंट has a lot of different names. The first I heard about cornerstone content was from ब्रायन ख्लारक of a copy blogger. This was way back in 2007. But it gained true significance when HubSpot, one of our sponsors, they called it pillar and cluster content or topic cluster content. Then I don't remember the name of the person. Someone gave it a name. It's called hub and spoke content model. Okay? So let's look at what this model looks like. So this is what HubSpot defines it. The central topic, the blue pillar that you see, the dark blue pillar, that's your cornerstone content, the pillar content of your website. Right? Which is the basic essential indispensable content that answers all the questions that your customers have about your product or solution. It's an overview of everything, let's say about swimming pools. Right? And then there is a cluster of content around it. What permissions do I need to take? What materials will be used? Are those materials harmful to children? Are they organic? How much water will it waste? Right? All of those questions need to be answered in different pieces of content which can be shorter in length. And then all of these pieces of content together create a topic cluster. The structure of your website is no longer a blog, one post after another. It's a well-structured piece of content which answers questions about your product or service. Got that? Right? So let's take a few examples. If you have been in SEO for any length of time, everyone knows this, the beginner's guide to SEO by Moz, right? Where the pillar content is organized into different chapters. The chapters from the clusters and the pillar content is your beginner's guide to SEO. Brandeen, everyone knows Brandeen, Backlinko, right? Link building guide for SEO. Again you will see this is one big piece of pillar content. And links to other blog topics of his like SEO ranking factors or outreach methods for link building. This one is very interesting, type form. Everyone, does anyone know here type form? Does anyone here know type form? Heard about type form? Yeah. So type form is like V forms. V devs apne jo ye hai ya gravity forms, ya contact form 7, whatever you are using. Right? But it's a hosted solution. They have created this topic cluster called brand awareness. On the right hand side you will see the clusters, which link to the various cluster articles for this particular pillar content. Right? So you can go there and you can try and understand why did type form, a form create content about brand awareness. That's interesting, right? Why does a form tool need to create a content about brand awareness? Find out, it's a really interesting reason. So what's pillar content? It's an overview of a specific topic, right? Which relates to your product or solution. Mozka SEO type form ka brand awareness, right? Brandeen ka link building. It is long form, typically 3000 to 10,000 words long. Sometimes some people have even created 20,000 words long content. It could become a small book. And it has an optional opt-in, where you can either give your email address to download the PDF version of this long form content or you could download a content upgrade like a checklist that goes along with this piece of content. What is cluster content? It's a subtopic, not your main topic, right? It is keyword-focused. Here keyword comes. This is keyword-focused. You are catering to the search engine over here. With the pillar content, you are catering to the people, not the search engine, right? And it links to the pillar, right? So this is your take-away tool. You create a pillar content. You optimize it for conversions. Get email addresses from people. Get them to download your pillar content and use that pillar content as a lead generation page. But your cluster content, you build it for search engines. Optimize it for keywords. So how do you implement this in WordPress? Look straight forward. But there are a few tricks you need to do to get this implemented in WordPress. So what will you use for pillar content? Page, post, category. Anyone? Page. Someone said page. Yeah. So why page? Why not a category? Okay. Yes, agreed. So there are a couple of reasons why we use a page instead of a category. First of all, category is an archive page, right? Where you have a list of blog posts. It's not sequential, right? The way you want people to learn about your topic, it's not in that sequence. It's in the sequence in which you have written your blog posts, right? That's one problem with category pages. The second problem with category pages is the editing experience is extremely limited. And if you look at the examples of pillar pages that I showed you, they are richly edited pieces of content. You'll find a lot of infographics, you'll find a lot of videos, you'll find a lot of formatting, right? Which is not possible if you want to edit a category description right now in your default WordPress system, right? And the third thing is pages are kind of, have a kind of permanence to them. They are not like blog posts, chronological or they can't get hidden on page 2 of your main blog page, right? They will be there always, your pages. That's why you use pages for your pillar content. Let's look at an example of how we do this. So let's say you're building a fitness website where your main topic is workout routines and then you have various other cluster topics like how do you work out without weights, how do you work out at home, how do you get abs, right? Obviously, I'm not the person who is building this kind of a website. So for pillar content, you'll use a WordPress page. Your URL would look something like this myfitside.com slash workout routines. You'll link it from your site navigation menu so that Google finds it easily. This is extremely important and you link to the other cluster content about workout routines from your pillar page. Next, your cluster content. These will be WordPress posts, right? Now ideally, you want your URL to be myfitside.com slash workout routine slash forabs or slash fact loss or slash at home, right? And it links back to pillar content but there's a problem here. Can anybody tell me what the problem is? Posts cannot be children of your pages. So if you're using the URL workout routines for your pillar page, how can you get a slash forabs or a slash fact loss or a slash at home in WordPress? That's the slight problem that we have in WordPress, right? Google expects you to have your pillar and cluster content organized this way but we can't do that right now in WordPress as it is. So we have to do a little bit of Jugaad and that Jugaad is step number one. Your blog posts need to have a custom structure permalinks slash category slash post name, right? So I'll tell you why. Just need to know this for now. In the next slide, I'll explain why do you need that category in your permalink. Then that's your category which you create workout routines slash category slash workout routines will be the permalink of your category, right? But we also have a pillar page which is slash workout routines.  So there and because you've set your permalink to slash category slash post name they'll appear as slash workout routines slash forabs or slash workout routines slash fact loss or slash workout routines slash home, right? But you don't want people to go to the category page. We want them to come to our pillar page so you do a 301 redirect to your pillar page. That's a small jugaad that you need to do to get your cornerstone content to work properly. So take away number three. You have to create the right content structure with the right permalinks and the right internal links. So that's my presentation. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to take them. Once again, I'm Jitesh. I work at hummingbird web solutions. I look after cyberchamps and WPK where we create beautiful WordPress themes and very useful WordPress plugins. Do check out both the websites.


What's up everybody, Jason here for JaspysCaseBrace.com. We just sold out 21-22 Panini Immaculate Basketball. One box break, number 73 random teams. And remember guys, we're giving you guys 30% off. Originally it was a $100 box, now it's only about 60, or sorry, not $100 in the box, but $100 is a spot, now it's $69.99 a spot. And again guys, random teams 72, 73, 74, 75, 76 are off in the same case. So there's four boxes remaining here. And again guys, big hit or miss break, but you do get three autos, two memorabilia cards, and chasing some Lamello rookies with Anthony Edwards, amongst others. Now here's the dice roller. We did have some players, customers buying straight up, the first 14, then everybody else got into packed fillers, 33 and 34 and won. So there's the winners, and then there's the teams. Roll it. Got ourselves a, really slow today guys, but we've just been working on the dice roll, which has been working, but I guess not for this break. But I'm gonna have to use real dice. If it doesn't work right now. All right, let's just use real dice, I guess. It's not working. So I don't like fly them, so they don't fly everywhere. There we go there. I'm not the best guys, but hey, it's just gonna have to do it. 11, at least that's a good roll. All right, 11, six out of five. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. So Deelo at the top, down to Bobby at the bottom. 11 here now. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. Hornets down to the Boston Celtics. So Deelo, you have the Charlotte Hornets. Nick Smith of the Mavs, as well as the Clippers. Michael P. with the Pelicans. Daniel Purdy with the Pistons. Daniel Lewis, Deelo with the Jazz. Bobby Blazers, Michael P. Cavs. Nick Bulls, Thunder. Bobby Sons, as well as Nuggets. Joe with the Grizzlies. Brian with the Hawks. Nick with the T-Wills. Daniel Rockets, Lakers. Nick Wizards, Bobby Bucks, as well as Nick Raptors. Daniel Kings, Nick Magic. Nick Smith as well with the 76ers. Bobby with the Pacers. Nick with the Warriors. Nick with the Spurs. Frank Nets, Michael Hughes, Nick's. And Bobby with the Celtics. All right, if anybody wants to trade, I'll give you guys a quick minute. All right, guys, well, I'm assuming no trades in, so let's just close the trade window. And four boxes left, guys. One, two, three, four.  If I roll one of those numbers, we'll use that box. If not, we'll re-roll it until I roll one. Four. One, two, three, four. We're gonna go with the bottom here on the right. All right, you guys, here we go. A little R-T there as well. All right, you guys, here we go. See what we got. Not the one time for the people, all right? Is he live in this or is he redemption in this? I don't remember, to be honest. All right, well, for the Charlotte Hortes to start us off, though, that is Terry Roseiro to 49. Yeah, I think he was a redemption in this, right? He's only been live for like Flawleton, NT, honestly. And Spectre, I think he was live. We got Marco Foltz to 99. Magic for Nick Smith. And I don't know what we pulled out of the first box, guys, but if we didn't pull anything crazy and don't pull anything crazy here potentially, then it could be some nice stuff hiding. Out of 99, John Mahalovic, or Fahalovic Celtics, that's going to Bobby. Redemption actually, right there. Then we got Modern Marks, Utah for Toronto. I'm probably actually a salesman. Toronto Raptors, Nick Smith. And it looks like we have a true RPA. Not with the Thunder anymore, though, but Theo Maladon. Three-color patch and autograph, 21 out of 99. That's going to go to the Thunder and Nick Smith. Let's check out the redemption, though. I think it's going to be a vet player, because usually the redemption for rookies would be at the bottom. Did you say there's a one-on-one and a triple auto in every box, in every inner case? There's supposed to be a triple auto, for sure, in a whole master case, but I know there's supposed to be at least one one-on-one in every inner. Yeah. There should be. I mean, obviously, every case is different, but Scorer's Club signatures, card number 18. Lamarcus Aldridge. And let me go make sure that Lamarcus Aldridge, who's that ghosted, because that could potentially be multiple teams or maybe it is Nets, but let's see. And Marks of Greatness, notice the Scorer's Club. Scorer's Club. Actually, this one is Portland Trailblazers, card 18. So just to show you guys, Scorer's Club. Lamarcus Aldridge's Blazers Edition. So Blazers is Bobby, PDX, baby. All right, guys, well, hey. Now looking back, not a crazy box. Dio Malodone was a little bit more better to chase, but hey, we didn't hit anything crazy out of the first box. Could be some massive stuff hiding the remaining three boxes. So if you guys want to run it back, I did post up another one box break, plus some fillers, Jaspyscasebricks.com. Thank you guys.