Okay, we are again in a situation where the first 10 or so applicants waiting for an AM are not ready to go through NM (e.g. have not done anything for the project yet, at least as far as I could tell from a quick glance). In the past, I would usually assign applicants to AMs even when they were not ready but due to lack of resources I stopped doing this. Now, I let the people wait in the hope they'll do something useful, then ping them and explain what's going on, wait some more, etc. But that's not a solution. I'm sufficiently pissed off that I have decided to introduce an "Front Desk says advocate check is okay check" in the database because it's not fun assigning applicants to AMs when the first 10 are all not ready (the FD view shows you the first 10 applicants who are waiting for assignment).
However, again, this is not a solution. I think the major problem is that advocates don't really have any idea what it implies to advocate someone, and this is mostly because there's no good documentation. I'd therefore like to create an advocate check-list which prospective advocates can go through when considering to advocate an applicant. I wanted to do this for months but never got around to it, so I asked Joerg today if he can prepare something. However, I feel it might be good to do some brainstorming first so we can come up with a list of things to put into this check-list. (FWIW, there is http://www.debian.org/devel/join/nm-advocate but it's crap, like most of the other NM docs. *Maybe* I'll get around to re-writing all of it during the Christmas "holidays" but I really doubt it; volunteers are welcome...) -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/
