rbo...@rcbowen.com wrote on 3/17/23 6:11 AM:
On Fri, 2023-03-17 at 12:56 +0000, Drew Foulks wrote:
Additionally, some sort of volunteer mentoring program would also be
a huge boon to keeping newcomers involved in the larger community.
While I strenuously agree, I also know how much work it is to run an
actual effective mentoring program. I would *LOVE* to see someone step
up to manage this, even as an informal spreadsheet, mailing list, or
whatever.
We had a "mentoring programme" with all sorts of structure until Rich
nuked it... 8-) because no-one really used it (except perhaps the couple
of people who checked in the webpages for it years ago).
We also have a separate (non-public) mentoring program, with simple
data-driven "who am I" forms, that got a handful of people to sign up...
but no-one seems to remember it's there.
The root issue is finding a group of people passionate about the idea to
actively maintain the program over a longer time than just a few months.
Questions that come to mind immediately are:
* Who would we be willing to "endorse" as mentors? Is there some kind
of vetting process so that we don't have random folks posing as
representatives of the Foundation?
Oh, yeah, the other key issue is finding volunteers for mentors who are
active enough that they will help more than just a few emails. And, I
agree with Rich: we need some vetting process along with training.
* What advice would we give those folks? In particular, I don't want to
throw people into the fire with no guardrails, and end up with people
feeling obliged to be a "do my homework" service. In the past, a HUGE
percentage of the people that come asking for mentoring are trying to
do an assignment for class with vague instructions like "Contribute to
an open source project".
Yup, and especially key guidelines for both sides of time commitment
expected. It needs to be very clear up front what the minimum amount of
effort a mentor is willing to give, and also a target of how long a
mentoring match is expected to last (at minimum).
We'd also need the program volunteers to do check-ins with
mentors/mentees occasionally to make sure something's happening.
* What kind of disclaimers would we need to put on such a program to
protect folks from people who don't get the results they're looking
for?
I'd want to look at some of the other projects/foundations who have
done this successfully, and see what landmines there are that we can
avoid stepping on.
Getting a wiki page with a rough outline of what ComDev might
realistically put together, plus a listing of other mentoring programs
in FOSS would be a great start; at least then we could constructively
think about this.
We do have more focused energy showing up here these days!
--
- Shane
ComDev PMC
The Apache Software Foundation
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
