Open Stack

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.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)