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.