ubuntu-bugcontrol team mailing list archive

[Sense Hofstede <sense@xxxxxxxx>]

2010/1/6 C de-Avillez <hggdh2@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> On 01/06/2010 06:46 AM, Pedro Villavicencio Garrido wrote:
>> Sense raised one important thing there, there's not a lot of people
>> triaging those mentorship requests, so if you want to help with that,
>> reply to this email so we can start working on setting up a new group of people to perform that task.
>>
>
> Something like that seems to be needed. For a while I hoped that the
> people that signed up for mentors would monitor and select candidates.
> This, unfortunately, (mostly) did not work.

Andy Whitcroft has been responding to a lot of mentorship requests lately,
maybe he would be interested.
I think I could help with responding to mentor requests (as well?).

> I tried, for a while, to monitor the queue and contact mentors via email
> or IRC; some answered, some did not. Then I got busy on a complex
> customer upgrade process [0], and have not had time to get back to it.
>
> Pedro and I tried to set the mailing list candidates to requests for
> membership in the mentorship LP group, but... got hit by an update to LP
> that broke the ABI [1]. This would allow us to concentrate on the LP
> group...
>
> The mentorship group was/is expected to work as follows:
>
> 0. all mentors are administrators to the group;
> 1. candidates for mentorship request admission to the group; this
> generates an email to the group;
> 2. mentors *were* expected to monitor these emails, and act on them as
> needed
> 2.1 upon accepting a candidate, the mentor will approve her/his membership
> 2.2 (still manual) the mentor then updates the wiki, adding the mentee
> under her/his entry
> 2.3 on finishing the mentorship, the mentor sends out an email to the
> list (and perhaps bug-control?) with her/his view of the mentee, and a
> final position -- accepted/rejected.
> 2.4 the mentor removes the mentee from the group.
> 3. The mentor's email is then acted on by the group; if the prevalent
> view is positive, the bugmeisters will then add the (previous) mentee to
> the bug-control group.
>
> The final item may still be subject of discussion, but we felt that a
> successful mentorship should end straight into bug-control. I still
> think so, by the way.
>
> Obviously, there are a *LOT* of informal takes summarised above; this is
> why I wrote "work-in-progress" in the wiki [2], [3]. And, again
> obviously, we need to clarify/set the whole thing up. Most of the
> changes happened because we felt the (then current) approach would
> impose an unneeded burden on the mentors.
>
> There is, still, some actions required from mentors (like following the
> influx of candidates, and acting on it), but I am not sure how it can be
> minimised *without* the new group Pedro refers to. This, of course, will
> shift this burden to the new group.

When becoming a mentor you shouldn't expect to have everything done for you.
If we have to take some terrible hard manual actions like adding a name to the
wiki page, than that's the way it is. But I do think that it indeed might not
be the best idea to let all mentors respond to mentor requests since people
will think someone else will do it and therefore won't do it themselves.

> Those of us that participated in the initial discussions about the
> bug-squad/control mentorship programme were -- and still are -- highly
> interested in having it in place. I, like many others, have somewhat
> informally, mentored many, but I really think a more formal approach is
> needed.
>

I do think this would be of great use as well. You'd only have to look at the
number of incoming mentor requests versus the incoming Bug Control
applications to see that the mentorship programme attracts a lot more
bug triagers.

If the 'Mentorship Candidates' table at the wiki isn't going to be
used in the future
I'd suggest to remove it since it now only confuses people. Instead I would
document the process of taking mentees at the wiki page.
Also, a lot of mentors haven't added a mentee to their table entry on
the wiki. Did
they forgot, or are these all mentees? If that would be true we'd have a serious
problem and there would be too many mentees candidates waiting for a mentor
that hasn't come after a few weeks still.

Next Bug Squad meeting we already have the pretty big topic of translation bug
reports and the way we and the Translations team should handle them and I
would also like to talk a bit about the Adopt-a-Package project. The mentorship
project would also deserve discussion, so we probably won't have enough time in
that one hour meeting. Maybe there should be an extra one a week later because
we currently have so many things to discuss?

Kind regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steːdə]