> > 2. We need the shepherds to compensate for mentor shortages in addition > to > > discovering those. > > I disagree. > > In short, you are conflating mentors with IPMC Members. They serve > *very* different roles. >
Greg, let me start by writing that I am not in some hurry to turn shepherds into pie. If they turn out to be a part of the long-term landcape, no worries here. On the other hand, let me try to refine my idea of why they should wither away. Model 1: The IPMC members supervise the podlings. This is delegated/scaled/divided-and-conquered by the mentors, who are IPMC members. Mentors supervise in addition coaching and guiding. If they do this job correctly, we would not need shepherds. In support of this model, I'll point out that we require mentors to be IPMC members. Why do we do this, if mentoring is not part of the supervisory process? Model 2: The mentors are the good cops, exercising a light touch, so we need some other IPMC members to perform supervision. Thus, shepherds. Greg, if I'm messed up your logic here, please excuse me. When I serve on a non-I-PMC, I read every message on dev, user, and private, and I try to pay some attention to commits. We don't ask shepherds to do anything like that. I've always thought that we asked mentors to do that. So, it seems to me, if we prefer model (2), we not only need shepherds, we need to ask more of them. If we prefer model (1), we need to continue to work to achieve a situation where every podling has a sufficiency of active, supervising mentors -- and identifying people in the podlings who have earned that role is one way to do it.
