On Thursday 21 July 2005 03:56, Erinn Clark wrote:
> Mentoring:
>
> So basically, we have a lot of mentors and not many mentees. This
> isn't a problem, necessarily, but one thing mentioned during the Q&A
> at the Debconf5 talk Magni and I gave was that it's interesting that
> we have a surplus of mentors whereas NM tends to not have enough AMs.
> Is there anything we should be doing to rectify this situation? Some
> of our mentors are not DDs, so that could account for part of the
> problem, but I also think that some of them /are/ DDs and are also
> not AMs. Should we try to get this kind of mentoring integrated with
> NM? Or elsewhere? Or maybe just not bother and let it keep going as
> is?
I think that mentoring, changes in the NM process and small teams are
strongly connected issues.
Mentoring is never a "give only" process. Mentees always, soon or
later, ask questions which needs research for a mentor. Searching for
new ways to explain things is always a good process to understand them
better. I see mentoring as a mutual learning eperience, even if this
does not show up at first sight. But it seems I am not saying anything
new here, as we miss mentees... but, is it really the case?
Watching the recent DebConf talk about NM process [1] made me think
about how this process could influence the whole Debian atmosphere.
The current process give the message: "you need to know a lot about
what you are going to do". IMHO, this does not reflect the pace at how
Debian evolve, and how new, better way to do stuff evolve all the
time [2].
I would prefer to see a NM process that say "you will need to learn
about what you are going to do and be ready to spread this knowledge
around". From my point of view, that means integrating some kind of
mentoring and teamwork in the NM process. All people in the NM queue
could be mentored in one domain or another. The debian-policy is a
very good but very boring document, and I personnaly would very welcome
any kind of interactive learning of its content. :)
I also think that small teams can only become reality if people start to
think about ways to work together, for sure, but also how a team can
change over the time. Being ready to welcome people and see other
leaving a team means some analysis of how reponsabilities are shared
among a team, and how knowledge is spread between its members.
Mentoring shows up once more here.
I have some experience of real life workshops, IRC sessions, and e-mail
mentoring, but I rarely had opportunities to think about my practices
with other mentors. Maybe we could start to write some kind of
Mentoring HOWTO, maybe? With the small team idea in mind, I see in
every DD a potential mentor, and I would see this document as a
valuable contribution to the Debian project.
[1]
http://dc5video.debian.net/2005-07-14/08-Debian_New_Maintainer_Process-Hanna_Wallach_Dafydd_Harries_Moray_Allan.mpeg
(kudos to Hannah, Dafydd and Moray)
[2] e.g. module-assistant, cdbs, versioned package trees,
make-jpkg...
Randomly thinking,
--
Jérémy
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