Re: selecting Debian mentors for the mentor summit
On 08/08/18 15:49, Lucas Kanashiro wrote:
>
>
> On 08/08/2018 06:59 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>>
>> On 08/08/18 10:50, Pranav Jain wrote:
>>> I agree to the point that we need to consider the past contributions
>>> to Debian. These contributions might not directly be technical but
>>> other sort too (volunteering for events, hosting mini Deb conf etc).
>>>
>>> I agree that quantifying these things is difficult. But, we need to
>>> have some parameters like bursary team do for DebConf.
>>>
>>
>> If both candidates have to be people with strong Debian experience then
>> we end up with a situation where new people never get any momentum, so
>> maybe we could aim to have one person who is an established contributor
>> and one person who is from the wider community or a first time mentor.
>> Is that a position that other people tend to agree with, or are people
>> asking for both mentors to be strong contributors to Debian?
>
> I understand that you want to give an opportunity to everybody but IMHO
I am working on the assumption that everybody puts in an equal amount of
effort as a mentor and therefore we need to try and ensure everybody has
an equal chance to attend the summit at least once.
Even if we are saying that one place has to go to somebody with wider
Debian experience, everybody else then has an opportunity to get the
other place.
> we are talking about two different types of conferences. In one hand we
> have conferences that create an environment to attract people, make them
> understand what is the project and try to absorb them, those are
> debconfs and minidebconfs for instance. In the other hand we have these
> "external" events where there is no sentiment of Debian community but we
> need to be there to share our knowledge and bring new ideas to the
> project, this mentor summit fits well here. My point is that summits
> like this is not the best place to try to gather new contributors.
Do other people feel we should look at it this way?
If the people we are selecting were being invited to give talks to the
whole conference audience then we may need to look more closely at how
well prepared they are.
In the past, it was an unconference event where people would split up
for lots of little workshops on just about any topic that people wanted
to propose. This year they mentioned it will have a new format.
As Olly mentioned, he will be there with another organization and there
may be a few other Debian people there too in other roles. I was there
with Ganglia in 2014 but we don't have a Ganglia t-shirt so I wore my
Debian shirt. I think that we had 5 people in a Debian photo one year.
So while I agree that we should make Debian experience and philosophy a
factor for at least one candidate, I feel that it is only one of several
factors.
> For example, in the Debconf 18 I met a great GSoC mentor that had never
> interacted with Debian community before (just in the context of GSoC)
> and I felt that after this experience he will get more involved with
> different areas of the project (he wanted to start packaging some
> softwares and he is already involved in the organization of a BID for
> the next debconfs)
>
> Those are just my thoughts about this subject :)
>
The Debian constitution[1] explicitly mentions packaging as an activity
of a developer but the same paragraph also refers to "other work which
the Project Leader's Delegate(s) consider worthwhile"
So people who only do something like mentoring or helping DebConf and
nothing else are eligible to be DDs on that basis, although it may be
argued they would be in the non-uploading category. Some people already
became DDs that way.
Based on the ideas[2] listed already, does anybody have any suggestion
about how to rate the candidates and come closer to a decision?
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
2. https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Outreach/GSoCMentorSummitSelectionPolicy
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