Updating the thread since we talked about this quite a bit in the -tc channel, too [0] (sorry for duplicating across communication mediums!) 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. [0] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2019-... [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/637025/ On 2/14/19 7:29 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Colleen Murphy wrote:
I feel like there is a bit of a disconnect between what the TC is asking for and what the current mentoring organizations are designed to provide. Thierry framed this as a "peer-mentoring offered" list, but mentoring doesn't quite capture everything that's needed.
Mentorship programs like Outreachy, cohort mentoring, and the First Contact SIG are oriented around helping new people quickstart into the community, getting them up to speed on basics and helping them feel good about themselves and their contributions. The hope is that happy first-timers eventually become happy regular contributors which will eventually be a benefit to the projects, but the benefit to the projects is not the main focus.
The way I see it, the TC Help Wanted list, as well as the new thing, is not necessarily oriented around newcomers but is instead advocating for the projects and meant to help project teams thrive by getting committed long-term maintainers involved and invested in solving longstanding technical debt that in some cases requires deep tribal knowledge to solve. It's not a thing for a newbie to step into lightly and it's not something that can be solved by a FC-liaison pointing at the contributor docs. Instead what's needed are mentors who are willing to walk through that tribal knowledge with a new contributor until they are equipped enough to help with the harder problems.
For that reason I think neither the FC SIG or the mentoring cohort group, in their current incarnations, are the right groups to be managing this. The FC SIG's mission is "To provide a place for new contributors to come for information and advice" which does not fit the long-term goal of the help wanted list, and cohort mentoring's four topics ("your first patch", "first CFP", "first Cloud", and "COA"[1]) also don't fit with the long-term and deeply technical requirements that a project-specific mentorship offering needs. Either of those groups could be rescoped to fit with this new mission, and there is certainly a lot of overlap, but my feeling is that this needs to be an effort conducted by the TC because the TC is the group that advocates for the projects.
It's moreover not a thing that can be solved by another list of names. In addition to naming someone willing to do the several hours per week of mentoring, project teams that want help should be forced to come up with a specific description of 1) what the project is, 2) what kind of person (experience or interests) would be a good fit for the project, 3) specific work items with completion criteria that needs to be done - and it can be extremely challenging to reframe a project's longstanding issues in such concrete ways that make it clear what steps are needed to tackle the problem. It should basically be an advertisement that makes the project sound interesting and challenging and do-able, because the current help-wanted list and liaison lists and mentoring topics are too vague to entice anyone to step up.
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.
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:
- Padawans are 1:1 trained by a dedicated, experienced team member - Padawans feel the Force, they just need help and perspective to master it - Padawans ultimately join the team* and may have a padawan of their own - Bonus geek credit for using Star Wars references
* unless they turn to the Dark Side, always a possibility
Finally, I rather disagree that this should be something maintained as a page in individual projects' contributor guides, although we should certainly be encouraging teams to keep those guides up to date. It should be compiled by the TC and regularly updated by the project liaisons within the TC. A link to a contributor guide on docs.openstack.org doesn't give anyone an idea of what projects need the most help nor does it empower people to believe they can help by giving them an understanding of what the "job" entails.
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.
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.