As a participant, I have two concerns about a player-mentor requirement. 1. Sustainability. In many ways, it is mentors who need to have their attention on The Apache Way and cultivating a sustainable project. That means, from my perspective, that mentors need to encourage others to do things, especially around project management and procedural matters, and not just take on matters without leaving any bread crumbs. It seems important that others learn how to do that sort of thing too, whether or not special karma is eventually required to perform the same activities.
2. I have learned repeatedly, and it is evidently well-known, that a developer is his own worst project manager. It has to do with attention being at a completely different place when heads-down in development tasks than when heads-up watching the horizon and keeping objectives and current effort aligned. When I am in developer mode, I need someone else to pull my attention out of the weeds and look to see what course I am on and where I am at on that course. I remember in the 60s when a colleague had ended up managing a project at GE Medical Systems (or something similar) and he confessed that his team made a terrible mistake -- they allowed him to program on their project. I'm not saying that a mentor could not be an effective player. I think doing it well while mentoring is not common and it might interfere with training and development as well. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) [mailto:ross.gard...@microsoft.com] Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 11:01 To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: RE: Incubator report sign-off Strawman: What if a mentor is *required* to be an active participant of the project. That is contributing code, voting on releases and generally engaging with the community, they would be a better mentor since they have a vested interest in the project itself. Sure, we might reduce the number of projects coming into the foundation but (IMHO) that is not a problem. Our goal as a foundation is not to be large, it is to be high quality. [ ... ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
