Re: fresh blood gets congested: long way to become DD
Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org> writes:
> * Moritz Muehlenhoff (jmm@inutil.org) [051111 23:40]:
>> Endless sponsoring is a waste of time, both for the DD-to-be, who has additional
>> work like preparing his new package for download, sending explanations along etc.
>> and the sponsor, who needs to review the upload again.
>
> I think it's true that we need to get faster. I just don't have *the*
> good idea how. Of course, ranting is not helpful (which you didn't, but
> others did) - but I don't have a good idea what is (except of getting
> more people to become AM, what we try, but is only limited successfull).
It's not purely a problem with the number of AM's. The bottlenecks I
see are:
1. Some applicants are slow to respond, or give poor answers, so they
hog their assigned AM.
2. AM's get busy and are slow to respond to applicants. Personally, I
frequently do AM work in short spurts, and then get too busy to do
any work for a month or so.
3. AM's are not available to have applicants assigned, either because of
(1) or (2), so applicants have to wait in the queue.
4. Then there's the infamous DAM bottleneck...
We can't force applicants to respond faster, but I think the other
bottlenecks are fixable. The common problem seems to be that one single
person per task (AM, FD, DAM) is not reliable enough, since the amount
of time any one developer can devote to NM fluctuates quite a bit.
A possible solution I see is, instead of assigning one AM per applicant,
all AM's are made a part of a committee to handle applicants. Then the
front desk sends the question templates to the applicant, and the
applicant directs their respond to the committee. The committee can
coordinate among themselves who will process which set of answers (or
section of answers). This gives greater flexibility for distributing
the work--for example, if an AM only wanted to focus on the licensing
questions, he or she could just process those answers for each
applicant.
This would help alleviate (2), since other AM's could step in when
needed. And, (3) would no longer be an issue.
If the DAM were to participate, or at least monitor, the progress of
each applicant handled by the committee, it would hopefully make his
decision easier. Or, since several developer eyeballs would already
have viewed the responses of the applicant, the need for the DAM to be
the final decision maker would be lessened. The decision of acceptance
could be reduced to a vote by AM's--say 5 AM's "approve" an applicant,
then that applicant is accepted.
--
Captain Logic is not steering this tugboat.
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