On 22 November 2011 14:08, Christian Grobmeier <grobme...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 2:03 AM, Joe Schaefer <joe_schae...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> To me a lot of the problem stems from the fact that the reports are >> misdirected- instead of informing the board about the activities of >> the IPMC, it tells them about the podling's activities, which doesn't >> scale properly. >> >> We should be reporting to the board about OUR work, not the work of >> the podlings. Podlings should only be brought in for a few specific >> examplesto mention. That's the first thing to correct. > > I really don't see a huge report actually. What are we doing? > - we vote podlings in and do some discussions on them. Thats already > on the report > - from time to time we work on the website. This is/was on the report too. > > So what else do we do?
Personally I think that if someone signs up as a mentor it is an indicator that they have some interest in the project succeeding. If this is the case then it is not unreasonable to expect a mentor to take an *active* interest in the projects success. That isn't to say that they should do the work, nor am I suggesting that they should be seen as anything other than volunteers. When I look at what I do for some of my podlings I realise I am involved with way too many. Consequently there are a couple that, in reality I do nothing useful on. There are a couple more where I'm just watching the subject lines, dipping in occasional to shot from the sidelines and making sure reports get written and signed off (more on that later). Finally, there are those that I am quite heavily invested in. Do I make a good mentor on those I do nothing for? No. Do I make a good mentor on those I just process paperwork for? Maybe, I do read the reports and give feedback to the community as a mentor (more on that later). But since I'm not really watching the project closely so that feedback is generic and possibly not too useful. Do I make a good mentor on those I am engaged with? You'd have to ask those communities that ;-) The question, for me is, what makes a good balance of mentors? Having someone fully engaged is great, but I like to know that at least one other mentor is watching over my shoulder. Having just one person in the middle category is dangerous - what if they are not available? Having three in the first category is bad. The IPMC should, in my opinion, be monitoring the health of the mentoring activties in order to provide their own advice and guidance where appropriate. Intervention would be rare, but occasionally necessary. This is exactly what the board does with its board reports. My only concern with this plan is whether this makes the IPMC, with its appointed reviewers, a mini-board with the IPMC membersip being the equivalent of members@ to the ASF board. We've avoided these structures since Jakarta days. > But how can you, as mentor, help with community building (hope I got > this right). Just because a mentor says "thou shalt build up a > community" this will not cause people to do it. I have had tried that > out, but it doesn't work. It depends on the podling people, not on the > mentors. Again, I assume that mentors only sign up because they see some value in the project. Why then is not reasonable to expect mentors to help with the community building? What is the minimum a mentor can do to help community building? At the very least a mentor should say "hey, your report only contains technical information, we're not really interested in that, we want to see what you are doing about community building - that's what makes a successful Apache project". I've found that this usually prompts the question "well what should we say" and then we have a dialogue drawing on the projects domain expertise and the mentors experience of community building in Apache projects. In my opinion it is harmful for mentors to roll up once a quarter and sign off on a report that has no community content at all, yet I see that in podling reports every month. At the ASF we say "community over code"? (some pefer "community before code") shouldn't mentors be saying that to podlings and helping them understand what it means to build (not just manage) a community project? >> I think the review needs to take place >> over a few days, on the podling's own dev lists, by 3 IPMC members actively >> voting >> on them. We can still collate the podling reports on the wiki, but the >> report we >> hand to the board should come from us, and it should be the product of those >> reviews. > > How does that look like? A podling says, we work to increase community > participation. How can one say this is not the case - because what > actually does "work on increasing community participation" mean. Other > thing mentioned often is: "we work towards a new release". I doubt a > mentor will find different, if a podling writes this on the report. I (try) not to let my podlings get away with "we work to increase community" or "we work towards a release". I ask for things like "In the lastquarter we have done X, Y and Z in order to try and build community, the effects were..." or "we still need to resolve a couple of licence conflicts before we can release, see JIRA-123" I'm not always interested in what the report actually says (although sometimes it is revealing) I'm more interested in the thoughts and conversations that result from such a request. > The IPMC is the only project I know at > the ASF which is not really community. A good and important observation. Especially when we consider that it is the first ASF wide "community" podlings experience. Ross --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
