On 10/3/07, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote: > Hey, > > Brandorr wrote: > > Project Description: To pair Senior developers and sysadmins with > > junior developers and sysadmins to learn various aspects of OS > > development and adminsistration. We would do outreach to university > > compsci programs. (this doesn't exclude non-students as mentees) > > It seems like the real success of this is being able to pair up people who > have > the expertise to be able to talk through and guide the mentee - how do you > intend to achieve this? > > From the Google Summer of Code perspective, I found it pretty hard trying to > motivate people to sign up as a mentor as there's very little incentive from > their side to get involved.
I plan to reach out to every community group on an ongoing basis, and ask people to help. Remember if we structure this right, the mentors should see benefits pretty quickly. Also the one difference from GSoC is that these mentoring relationships would be ongoing relationships, not a two month fling. Theoretically, a mentee should feel comfortable contacting his/her mentor through their academic and professional career. (Hey I think we might have an idea for a new social networking site here). ;) I plan to sell it is as, "get your own pliable little minion than can help offload some of your work, in exchange for guidance and a little training." (Or something like that. I don't think that's quite the right message. I'll probably have to rework the wording a bit.) How about "Maybe, you feel like you are the only one who knows how to do your job, and you have a backlog of work ten miles long. Invest a little time now, so that in the future there will be others that have the skills to help you plow through that backlog" I know for a fact that in the networking driver community there is someone that is itching to find people interested in learning to code network drivers (I'm pretty sure it was Garett) I had been trying to figure out an existing mentoring program to join, when I saw that Garrett was very interested in giving a presentation on writing networking drivers.. Being that the mentoring meme was already in the back of my head, I kind of extrapolated it from there into a community building project. Personally, I don't think the issue is going to be finding mentors. I think it is going to be finding mentees. As I have no idea how to go about that side of the equation. (I think I will have to lean on the various UGs a bit for that, since they have geographic diversity.). We could also contact university compsci faculty directly. Cheers, Brian > Glynn > -- - Brian Gupta http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/
