David Crossley wrote:
Ross Gardler wrote:
As you know I met with many of the Forrest Devs for the first time at
Apachecon last week. One of the things discussed was how do we immerse
our Google Summer of Code participant and other new arrivals on the dev
list in the ways of the community. Here is my starter on how to do that,
it is my attempt to describe what *I* see as the "ideal" path from being
a "mere" user to being a leader within the community.
[ snip lots of good stuff for brevity's sake. ]
...
I find that diagram to be very dangerous. Any shape that
has pointy bits at the top is misleading. The label
"Leaders" is particularly bad. Perhaps a better term
would be "Mentors", i.e. those who help others to
understand the way we do things at the ASF.
+1
The ideal
is to broaden and merge the layers so that everyone
becomes a mentor and assists each other. That is what
i look for when inviting new committers: their ability
to be a mentor and to work cooperatively with their peers.
+1
And i don't want to see "committers" treated as a separate
layer. So i would like to redraw the diagram as below,
with meritocracy [1] being the force which tends to merge
the layers and cause the walls to become more vertical.
_________
/ \
/ Mentors \
/ \
/ Developers \
/ \
/ Users \
/_____________________\
[1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
Or perhaps even better (since the purpose of the diagram is to show the
need for a large user base):
.-----------------------------------------------------------------.
| Users | Developers | Mentors |
`-----------------------------------------------------------------'
------> Meritocracy drives people in this direction
(reminder, it really would be great if someone could pull these ideas
into a document for our community)
Ross
