+1 ________________________________ From: Marvin Humphrey Sent: 2/1/2012 8:06 AM To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Fwd: mentoring individuals as well as projects
On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 01:54:18PM +0000, Ross Gardler wrote: > My point is that when we help guide individuals who demonstrate a > willingness to contribute those individuals often grow in capacity. There was a memorable post on another ASF list a few months ago which compared Apache's decentralized leadership model to that of military organizations and contrasted it with the stiff hierarchical model common in the corporate world. It linked to an article which studied the question of why "military service -- particularly service in the crucible of combat -- is exceptionally effective at developing leaders."[1] The article author's answer, in part: Secondly, military leaders tend to hold high levels of responsibility and authority at low levels of our organizations. Top level PMCs at Apache are largely autonomous, but when it comes to binding votes on releases, podlings are wholly dependent on IPMC members whose attentions often wander. Our future PMC members do not "hold high levels of responsibility and authority at low levels of our organization" -- instead, projects have a boolean "graduated/not-graduated" property whereby podlings move from having no autonomy and mandatory supervision to having near-total autonomy and scant supervision after graduation. I believe that we would develop better future PMC members if PPMC members were encouraged to earn partial autonomy for their podlings by earning a binding vote for themselves. Serving alongside Mentors encourages podling contributors to think like Mentors, exercising "servant leadership" and devolving responsibility within their own projects. Presently, we do not often take advantage of this opportunity to expand the "capacity" of these "individuals who demonstrate a willingness to contribute" within the "crucible" of incubation -- to our podlings' detriment and our own. Marvin Humphrey [1] http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2009/02/why-the-military-produces-grea.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
