Dhruv Gami <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [snipping out previous conversation due to its length]
> Here are my thoughts on the mentorship discussion. Im just > throwing out ideas, to further this discussion: Thank you for your comments. I would like to see input and involvement from lots of people. > 1. I think its an excellent idea. I have seen a similar setup for > engineering students in american universities, called > MentorNet. [...] Thanks for the pointer to MentorNet. > 2. I believe that we may need to start small and work with one > or two campuses in maybe a couple of cities to see how it > goes, [...] For the moment, I am specifically talking about a few colleges in Delhi. The National Resource Centre for FOSS (NRCF) in Chennai apparently has some 50-odd colleges lined up there. I will circulate a write-up among people based in other Indian cities, but I think that those will have to be handled by local people. > Now lets take this scenario to a global level. A student in > germany wishes to work on a specific project for his > research, but the mentors for that kind of a project are not > available in germany, and he struggles on without much help. > With the help of this kind of a mentor network, he might be > able to locate a willing mentor in another country [...] Let us not overextend ourselves at this moment. From what I see, we barely have enough committed mentors at the moment to cover a few colleges in Delhi. While someone willing to relocate to Delhi would obviously be welcome, I do not see that we currently need to start worrying about handling such things. Discussions on this topic are available on the Internet, and there will probably end up being an online presence for the program, but I do not see the possibility for a global effort spurred by us in the near term. At least to me, it is very clear that the primary purpose of this program is to speed up the adoption of FOSS in India. > 3. I like the idea of having a committee to decide on basic > things and settle disputes, confusions etc. Just to get more > visibility, we could make sure we have representatives from > large corporations like IBM, Sony, Novell etc which support > Open Source, to be a part of this committee. Sony supporting open-source? You are kidding, right? Or, have you been living in a cave the past couple of months? > Moreover, we can set up a model of sponsorship with these > and other firms, by providing them a platform to pick proteges > that perform well. This also in turn becomes a motivating > factor for more proteges to join in and perform better, in order > to get a chance of campus-recruitment style of landing a job. I am quite sceptical about (a) corporate involvement: Open- source companies are OK, as long as the terms of involvement are clearly spelt out, e.g., they should not get representation on the committee solely for having funded part of the project, (b) promoting this as a path to a job for students. As a mentor, my primary interest is to promote open-source practices among students because they believe in the philosophy and community behind the movement, and not because it is just another career path. While it is indeed necessary to show students that your FOSS experience from such projects will help you get a good job, if finding jobs for graduates from the program were an essential goal, we should be teaching them Windows because of the (currently) bigger job market. > 4. It would be nice if this committee could regulate the > "domains" of projects. Lets say, internationalisation, > communication, collaboration, operating systems etc could be > the kind of domains, and have a single domain manager. [...] The domains for the projects will obviously be the ones in which the mentors have expertise, and in which the students are interested. As for the organizational structure, currently my view is of mentor-student groups, with a single oversight committee. There is no point in starting to plan extended hierarchies when we barely have enough base-level people. > 5. We may even need a team of volunteers that oversee the > advertising, marketing etc of this sort of a network, and talk to > companies, and universities to start recognizing the > mentorship that students receive from such a set up [...] Forgive me if I am wrong, but it seem like you are looking at this mentorship thing as a commercially profitable company. Sorry, but I am not interested in that kind of an enterprise. While I personally do feel that mentors should get some compensation for their time, and that students should receive small stipendships, running yet another for-profit education/training institute is the last thing I want to do. Regards, Gora Send instant messages to your online friends http://in.messenger.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
