+ 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