Hello Matt, Everyone, Interesting ideas indeed. I can tell you some insights we did not apply yet to the program - from the Apache Airflow - and some proposal, maybe this will be helpful:
1) no response from the Airflow PMCs or community yet. None of the PMCs was eager to go for it - despite Kaxil and myself heavily promoting the whole idea, successful story behind Ephraim and Omair delivering together with Kamil) crucial part of Apache Airflow 2.0 (API) and even us heavily promoting Outreachy ad Ephraims and Omair's role in API development (twice - at the NYC meetup and at the Airflow Summit's "What's new in Airflow 2.0". This is rather worrisome indeed 2) However in our case we have a rather aggressive Airflow 2.0 timeline to follow - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/AIRFLOW/Airflow+2.0+-+Planning and basically starting a week ago till end of December we can see most of the active PMC members super busy. This was the word I 've heard from Kaxil and pretty much every single active PMC member of Apache Airflow has some area of responsibility to manage with rather tight (self-imposed though) deadlines and a lot of urgent things to complete. Those are super important things with a lot of cross-dependencies, so we cannot really afford risking to pass any of those tasks to interns or risking that we will be dragged out from our most important tasks by supervising the interns. 3) I am myself considering applying, but I asked for e co-mentor as I know, due to 2.0 stuff I might be unavailable at times or simply torn into too many directions (it's not only Airflow contributions but also our customers who depend on the 2.0 outcome and there also my 2.0 -related tasks will be impacted). So should I find a co-mentor, I would love to apply. I am going to follow-up again, but so far we had 0 response from other PMCs (or committers because I also invited committers) 4) I think this is very true that coming with a good project is a big part of the success here. The API idea of ours was perfect for many reasons (many small, independent tasks, very well defined outcomes and a person who was in charge of it - one of the committer, Kamil was fantastic in splitting the work and supervising our interns). But that was simply great timing - we have very little number of similar projects, it would be difficult to come up with something equally well fit. And for now - again - our minds are on 2.0 and it's even hard to think of what's beyond. However I think there might be a way. I think what works best is great community and good examples. I think choosing the 'private@' list might not necessarily be the best way of advertising yourself. I think often PMCs are pretty busy and they only act and forward things to their communities if this is something really important. I think not everyone (like Kaxil and myself) forwarded the message from you to the wider community (dev@) or thought seriously about being involved. Maybe - just maybe - it would be much better if you simply send a message to each of the dev@ mailing lists? It sounds like spam, but, to be perfectly honest it does not have to be. You might do it in a way that will be more personalized for each community. Simply starting the message with "Dear Apache Airflow committers" might do wonders. I use https://www.streak.com/ with my gmail account to send such emails and it helps me to manage the messages and responses (and it's free for single-person use). It's just a matter of importing "email + community name" and you can easily send personalized emails to each of the projects. Also if you could produce a list of example projects that other outreachy members successfully completed in the past (might be in Apache or other organisations, that might help people to come up with their own ideas. If you could even tailor the projects somehow depending on the project type - that would be awesome (but might be too much work) I think targeting committers rather than PMCs might actually give you better results - they might come up with ideas they had no time to implement themselves and propose the projects to their PMC and find a PMC to (co-) mentor. I think this might be a bit of reversal of the current rule - but to be perfectly honest, I was always surprised why you are targeting PMCs first rather than committers. As I understand the PMC role - PMCs are not more "suited" to be mentors in the Outreachy program than committers. PMC role is really the "legal" side of the project plus proposing and voting on new project members, they have no more skills or responsibilities on the project than other committers (also from a diversity point of view, community building, or project leading). There is nothing special about being PMC than making sure the project follows Apache Way in releases and processes. At least this is how I see the PMC role. On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 6:32 PM Matt Sicker <boa...@gmail.com> wrote: > These sound interesting. Answers below: > > On Sat, 12 Sep 2020 at 20:15, Griselda Cuevas <g...@apache.org> wrote: > > IDEAS: > > - Contact PMCs directly > > I sort of did this by sending the past two emails to pmcs@ which BCCs > every PMC private@ list. Are you suggesting personalized messages to > PMCs? Contacting them through their dev@ lists? Choosing some random > subset to contact directly to try and start a conversation? > > > - Reach out to ASF teams such as conferences, infra, ponymail, kibble, > etc. > > and see if they could use the help > > - Propose projects for D&I for example, build our website > > - Perhaps also defining a project to revamp the ASF website > > - Think about localization as a type of project and encourage projects to > > do it > > These all sound useful for gathering project ideas, though they also > need mentors to go with them. I'm not sure if this is a chicken/egg > problem here where potential mentors shy away from volunteering due to > a lack of project ideas, or if the project ideas are all there, but > nobody has time or desire to mentor. Personally, I've usually been > more on the side of lacking project ideas that I can effectively > mentor due to my historic lack of ability to delegate development > tasks (being a PM/PO seems fairly complicated to me outside any > project I'm intimately familiar with), though I've also considered > applying to mentor here due to a lack of volunteers (I've avoided > applying so far as to not create a conflict of interest when approving > mentors/projects, particularly if we had more applications than > availability). > > > - Promote the opportunity in the members list but with a list of ideas so > > people get inspired > > This seems like an interesting idea. I worry a bit, though, that at > least 99+% of the members are already subscribed to at least one > private@ PMC mailing list (almost every ASF Member started off as a > PMC Member of one or more projects here). Perhaps those emails are too > spread out for any discussion to take place, and therefore a list like > members@ would have more interaction? > > > - Reach out to the incubator and see if any of the podling could use the > > help > > This seems like it could help. I wouldn't prescribe any particular > policy, but I'd imagine that any Podlings that are actively mentoring > people via GSoC or Outreachy shows a fairly mature community which > aids in graduating to a top level project. > > > - Create cohorts by roles, e.g. build a taskforce of tech-writers or > > designers interested in mentoring outreachy interns despite of the > project > > they will work on. This idea is to solve for projects that would benefit > > from design or tech writers for they don't have these folks in their PMCs > > so they can't mentor. > > This is probably my favorite idea so far! This sounds especially > useful since it seems easier to recruit interns for web development > and more creative fields. I can strongly empathize with the idea that > some PMCs are lacking in certain areas (like graphic design, web > design, documentation) that simply don't have the expertise to improve > that. For example, I don't think anyone in the Logging PMC are > designers, so it would be difficult for any of us to mentor a graphic > artist or web designer to overhaul our website or similar design > tasks. That expertise, though, is obviously not lacking at the ASF > entirely as there are several projects here with very nice websites > and documentation, some of which I've seen the tooling promoted here > at D&I in the past (I think it might've been from Airflow?). > > > - Promote in communications about ApacheCon(?) > > - Promote in the ASF Newsletter > > These sound useful, though I'm not sure what to do about either. > > > -- > Matt Sicker <boa...@gmail.com> > -- +48 660 796 129
