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<tt><font size="-1">Updating the thread since we talked about this
quite a bit in the -tc channel, too [0] (sorry for duplicating
across communication mediums!)<br>
<br>
TL;DR the usefulness of job descriptions is still a thing. To
kick start that, I proposed an example to the current help
wanted list to kick start what we want our "job descriptions" to
look like [1], if we were to have them.<br>
<br>
[0]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2019-02-14.log.html#t2019-02-14T16:53:55">http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2019-02-14.log.html#t2019-02-14T16:53:55</a><br>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://review.openstack.org/#/c/637025/">https://review.openstack.org/#/c/637025/</a><br>
</font></tt><br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/14/19 7:29 AM, Thierry Carrez
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:5b651d3d-ac42-e46d-c52b-9e9b280d2af3@openstack.org">Colleen
Murphy wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I feel like there is a bit of a disconnect
between what the TC is asking for
<br>
and what the current mentoring organizations are designed to
provide. Thierry
<br>
framed this as a "peer-mentoring offered" list, but mentoring
doesn't quite
<br>
capture everything that's needed.
<br>
<br>
Mentorship programs like Outreachy, cohort mentoring, and the
First Contact SIG
<br>
are oriented around helping new people quickstart into the
community, getting
<br>
them up to speed on basics and helping them feel good about
themselves and
<br>
their contributions. The hope is that happy first-timers
eventually become
<br>
happy regular contributors which will eventually be a benefit to
the projects,
<br>
but the benefit to the projects is not the main focus.
<br>
<br>
The way I see it, the TC Help Wanted list, as well as the new
thing, is not
<br>
necessarily oriented around newcomers but is instead advocating
for the
<br>
projects and meant to help project teams thrive by getting
committed long-term
<br>
maintainers involved and invested in solving longstanding
technical debt that
<br>
in some cases requires deep tribal knowledge to solve. It's not
a thing for a
<br>
newbie to step into lightly and it's not something that can be
solved by a
<br>
FC-liaison pointing at the contributor docs. Instead what's
needed are mentors
<br>
who are willing to walk through that tribal knowledge with a new
contributor
<br>
until they are equipped enough to help with the harder problems.
<br>
<br>
For that reason I think neither the FC SIG or the mentoring
cohort group, in
<br>
their current incarnations, are the right groups to be managing
this. The FC
<br>
SIG's mission is "To provide a place for new contributors to
come for
<br>
information and advice" which does not fit the long-term goal of
the help
<br>
wanted list, and cohort mentoring's four topics ("your first
patch", "first
<br>
CFP", "first Cloud", and "COA"[1]) also don't fit with the
long-term and deeply
<br>
technical requirements that a project-specific mentorship
offering needs.
<br>
Either of those groups could be rescoped to fit with this new
mission, and
<br>
there is certainly a lot of overlap, but my feeling is that this
needs to be an
<br>
effort conducted by the TC because the TC is the group that
advocates for the
<br>
projects.
<br>
<br>
It's moreover not a thing that can be solved by another list of
names. In addition
<br>
to naming someone willing to do the several hours per week of
mentoring,
<br>
project teams that want help should be forced to come up with a
specific
<br>
description of 1) what the project is, 2) what kind of person
(experience or
<br>
interests) would be a good fit for the project, 3) specific work
items with
<br>
completion criteria that needs to be done - and it can be
extremely challenging
<br>
to reframe a project's longstanding issues in such concrete ways
that make it
<br>
clear what steps are needed to tackle the problem. It should
basically be an
<br>
advertisement that makes the project sound interesting and
challenging and
<br>
do-able, because the current help-wanted list and liaison lists
and mentoring
<br>
topics are too vague to entice anyone to step up.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Well said. I think we need to use another term for this program,
to avoid colliding with other forms of mentoring or on-boarding
help.
<br>
<br>
On the #openstack-tc channel, I half-jokingly suggested to call
this the 'Padawan' program, but now that I'm sober, I feel like it
might actually capture what we are trying to do here:
<br>
<br>
- Padawans are 1:1 trained by a dedicated, experienced team member
<br>
- Padawans feel the Force, they just need help and perspective to
master it
<br>
- Padawans ultimately join the team* and may have a padawan of
their own
<br>
- Bonus geek credit for using Star Wars references
<br>
<br>
* unless they turn to the Dark Side, always a possibility
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Finally, I rather disagree that this
should be something maintained as a page in
<br>
individual projects' contributor guides, although we should
certainly be
<br>
encouraging teams to keep those guides up to date. It should be
compiled by the
<br>
TC and regularly updated by the project liaisons within the TC.
A link to a
<br>
contributor guide on docs.openstack.org doesn't give anyone an
idea of what
<br>
projects need the most help nor does it empower people to
believe they can help
<br>
by giving them an understanding of what the "job" entails.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I think we need a single list. I guess it could be sourced from
several repositories, but at least for the start I would not
over-engineer it, just put it out there as a replacement for the
help-most-needed list and see if it flies.
<br>
<br>
As a next step, I propose to document the concept on a TC page,
then reach out to the currently-listed teams on help-most-wanted
to see if there would be a volunteer interested in offering
Padawan training and bootstrap the new list, before we start to
promote it more actively.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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