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.2019-02-14.log.html#t2019-02-14T16:53:55
[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.