Re: New mentoring activities

On 14/12/2010 12:11, florent andré wrote:
> Hi Ross,
>
> I'm interested in for the Lenya project.
>
> But I'm just a commiter and I ask myself if I can be a mentor for such a
> program ?
>
> For sure, I could be a "friendly face" ! :)

"just a committer"? That means you know how the project works and have 
commit access to the repo, so yes, you are certainly able to be a 
mentor. Being a "friendly face" is a significant bonus.

Ross

>
> cced dev@lenya
> ++
>
> On 12/14/2010 10:25 AM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>> Below is the text of a mail I sent to the PMCs last night. Copied here
>> for information:
>>
>> Over the next few weeks your project may be approached by students
>> participating in a European Commission funded project called OpenSE [1].
>> These students will be looking for GSoC style mentors in open source
>> projects.
>>
>> The headline info you need is:
>>
>> * Mentors will not need to commit as much time as they do to GSoC
>>
>> * The student/mentor relationship should be largely the same as any
>> other relationship with someone new to your project
>>
>> * Students will, in general, work on existing issues in your project,
>> but some may come with their own ideas
>>
>> * All work by the student should be managed and recorded using your
>> projects normal workflow
>>
>> * Students will not be full time on the project
>>
>> * Students will not be paid
>>
>> * Students will have external support from teachers and teaching assistants
>>
>> The key message for your project community is that this activity should
>> present minimal additional overhead to your normal community support
>> activities.
>>
>> Having said that, there are a few additional, but small, tasks we ask
>> you to perform during the course of a mentored project:
>>
>> * acknowledge your agreement to mentor a student
>>
>> * provide a brief evaluation of the students activities half way through
>> the project cycle (around 6 weeks in most cases)
>>
>> * provide a brief evaluation of the students activities at the end of
>> the project cycle (around 12 weeks in most cases)
>>
>> Each of these activities is recorded in a JIRA issue in the ComDev
>> project. This issue will be created by the student during the
>> application process.
>>
>> It is important to stress that we are not asking mentors to take any
>> responsibility for the success of the students work. All we ask is that
>> you act as a "friendly face" within your community and provide brief
>> evaluations as described above.
>>
>> Unlike in GSoC these students will (in most cases) be doing this work as
>> part of their formal education. All students will have external tutors
>> and teaching assistants helping them. Therefore, you should only need to
>> help them with their direct contributions to your project (design, code
>> review, applying patches etc.)
>>
>> Unlike in GSoC students will not be working full time on their projects
>> and thus the overhead on mentors will be considerably less.
>>
>> The Community Development project is encouraging and supporting this
>> activity in an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach to
>> helping students understand open source development whilst bringing some
>> valued patches to our projects.
>>
>> You can find some more information about the mentoring programme (which
>> will evolve in response to experiences and feedback in this experiment)
>> at http://community.apache.org/mentoringprogramme.html
>>
>> If you have any questions please mail [email protected] (or if
>> you explicitly want to seek out students for your project).
>>
>> If you agree to mentor a student all we ask is that you also subscribe
>> to the [email protected] list (it's low traffic) and touch base
>> with us now and again to let us know how things are going.
>>
>> Ross
>> On behalf of the Community Development Project
>>
>> [1] http://opense.net/