A professional organization, the National Society of Genetic Counselors, had a need to create a web site that would allow creation of mentor relationships among their members.  With their membership being across the USA, in-person meetings do not happen often, so the need to have an easy way to find a mentor and interact with them was crucial.

The mentor relationship is established, then the website facilitates communcation between the members by email and also by the online profiles that each member has.

A workflow is in place where members apply to become a mentor, members with a "committee" role are called upon to review and approve these mentor applications.  Once a NSGC member is an approved mentor, they are browsable by all users on a Mentor Finder page, which uses filterable fields and google maps integration to allow members to find a suitable mentor and request to be mentored online.  The request, much like a social networking friend request, is allowed to be accepted or denied by the prospective mentor.

The web application we created to solve this problem can be visited here: NSGC Mentor Site.

It is a Drupal 6 application with a custom module that we created to handle the mentor relationship management.  The Mentor Finder function is a google maps mashup using working locations of members, and it is all tied together using the YUI javascript framework.