Re: Requesting DDs who want to help greet new contributors
On Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:00:18 PM Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> Hi all Debianites,
>
> I've been inspired by the "Developer Advisory Team" in another project
> [1], and so I want to create a similar team within Debian. In this email,
> first I'll summarize what the concept of Developer Advisory Team is, and
> second I'll request help.
>
> The stated goals are:
>
> * Reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get
> feedback.
>
> * Reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and
> help them.
>
> * Reach out to contributors that went inactive and get feedback from them
> and offer help.
>
This sounds like means rather than goals to me. My guess is that the goal
would be something like "create a feel-good atmosphere around and within
Debian" or "get more people engaged in the development of Debian".
If the latter is what we want, how about also involving some other leverages:
* promoting the mentoring principle as the official Debian way of building
the community's skill pool. Mentoring is known to be the by far most efficient
pedagogy [citation pending] - a perfect match for the best distribution :)
* the mentoring principle holds the promise of exponential growth, which is
interesting if you can get the coefficient sufficiently far above 0 (one
mentor can teach "two", who can teach "two" etc.). Pushing up the coefficient
could also be achieved by contributors to the project acting increasingly as
advocates for it. This advocacy could be built around narratives such as
"Contributing to a project like Debian is something one can be proud of - tell
that you do, what you do, why you do it and encourage others to do it."
Social engineering can also be quite efficient :)
Thanks for a fine initiative,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas Guilbert
"Intelligence: property of a lifeform capable of outliving its planet of
origin"
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