On Fri, 18 May 2007 22:09:56 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: [training the "next generation"] > > I'm not following the Linux community closely; do you think there are > > points Debian could adopt or learn from? I try to summarize (hopefully correctly) your points: > With Linux, I think it helps a lot that many of the people involved in > kernel development are paid to do it and mentor others as part of their > job. I do similar things for Debian, training other people in my group on > how to build Debian packages and participate in the infrastructure, and > hopefully over time that will bear fruit for Debian as well. - experienced people as mentors for newcomers > Linux also has a good history of organized projects to help people get > started, such as kernel janitors, and puts a lot of effort into > collaboration infrastructure. - teamwork and collaboration, facilitated by the necessary infrastructure > And one of the best things about the Linux > model is that Linus regularly talks about how he wants things done and > what leads him to take stuff or not take stuff in public on the lists, > which leads others to do the same. And those are interactive discussions, > not just writeups. I think people learn a lot from those discussions. - open discussions about future developments > On Debian, the impression that I've gotten is that a lot of the real > mentoring and discussion actually happens on IRC rather than on the > lists. I don't know how effective that is. I don't know either; probably there's a lot to "grab" by just following some channels but OTOH the S/N ration is sometimes not really helpful and IRC doesn't seem to be a dedicated mentoring approach at the moment. Regarding your other points I think * there is a trend towards more teamwork and there is infrastructure available for it; * mentoring is happening by chance (in the teams, by some long-time sponsors, maybe by some AMs) but not in a planned way; * maybe some discussions are initially not led in public (but I'm not sure about that one). > > Hm, maybe that sounds naïve, but what about thinking about a way to > > adopt strategies of mentoring, development, fine graining roles (job > > descriptions, mutual agreements, appraisal&evaluation, ...) , etc. to > > F/LOSS in general and Debian in particular? > The main obstacle that I see is that that stuff takes a lot of time. I > spend probably 5% of my work time on the coordination, record-keeping, and > reporting parts of that sort of activity, which in a full-time job is > quite reasonable. But it's not really a percentage; it's a quantity of > time that those activities take. And I couldn't take a similar two hour > per week cut out of my Debian volunteer work without a much greater impact > on how much stuff I could get done. Sure, mentoring/training/staff development takes time but as you point out at the beginning it probably "bear[s] fruit for Debian". Maybe Debian would be better off in the long run if some of the experienced DDs decided to drop one package or resign from one infrastructure task and to use the saved time for taking an "apprentice". I don't know if there have been any organized mentoring/training programmes in Debian in the past; the only one I know at the moment is organized by the Debian Women project [0] but TTBOMK it's not very active. -- IMO it's a good idea anyway! Cheers, gregor [0] http://women.debian.org/mentoring/ -- .''`. http://info.comodo.priv.at/ | gpg key ID: 0x00F3CFE4 : :' : debian: the universal operating system - http://www.debian.org/ `. `' member of https://www.vibe.at/ | how to reply: http://got.to/quote/ `- NP: Rolling Stones: She's A Rainbow (45 version)/She's a Rainbow - 2
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