+ openstack-mentoringOn Thu, 2019-01-31 at 11:45 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Hi everyone,
The "Help most needed" list[1] was created by the Technical Committee to clearly describe areas of the OpenStack open source project which were in the most need of urgent help. This was done partly to facilitate communications with corporate sponsors and engineering managers, and be able to point them to an official statement of need from "the project".
[1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/help-most- needed.html
TIL - will start sharing this with our mentees when they sign up.
This list encounters two issues. First it's hard to limit entries: a lot of projects teams, SIGs and other forms of working groups could use extra help. But more importantly, this list has had a very limited impact -- new contributors did not exactly magically show up in the areas we designated as in most need of help.
When we raised that topic (again) at a Board+TC meeting, a suggestion was made that we should turn the list more into a "job description" style that would make it more palatable to the corporate world. I fear that would not really solve the underlying issue (which is that at our stage of the hype curve, no organization really has spare contributors to throw at random hard problems).
So I wonder if we should not reframe the list and make it less "this team needs help" and more "I offer peer-mentoring in this team". A list of contributor internships offers, rather than a call for corporate help in the dark. I feel like that would be more of a win-win offer, and more likely to appeal to students, or OpenStack users trying to contribute back.
We've got a list of folks now who have volunteered to be mentors for various topics but we've struggled to get mentees and mentors engaged with each other and the program. There seems to be a hurdle between "I need/want to help" and active participation. A list of "this team needs this specific help" might actually be beneficial to getting people active, whereas I don't know that we'd gain much from another list of people who are generally open to helping (as much as that willingness to help is appreciated).
Proper 1:1 mentoring takes a lot of time, and I'm not underestimating that. Only people that are ready to dedicate mentoring time should show up on this new "list"... which is why it should really list identified individuals rather than anonymous teams. It should also probably be one-off offers -- once taken, the offer should probably go off the list. Thoughts on that? Do you think reframing help-needed as mentoring-offered could help? Do you have alternate suggestions?
Hopefully some of the folks who have signed up for the cohort mentoring program can share their thoughts here.
-jill