This mail is the conclusion of a private discussion between Sina and myself. I am sending my conclusion to the public dev list since we try, as far as possible, to do everything in public. Very occasionally we have to do things in private as they are of a sensitive nature, but this conclusion of our private discussion will benefit the whole community.
Doing things in public can be very difficult and is, without doubt, the hardest thing to learn about open source. This mail does not relate directly to our other GSoC candidate, only to Sina for whom I am the assigned mentor. For me, one of the benefits of the GSoC programme is that we get to talk about these difficult issues so that others trying to get over this initial involvement hurdle, i.e. those lurking here, can gain some understanding of how things work. For the benefit of those on the dev list, the background is that I have to complete a mid term evaluation of Sina's involvement in the GSoC programme. This is quite alien to the way we do open source development around here. Under normal ASF community development models everyone does what they are able to do at the pace they set for themselves. Unfortunately within GSoC, Google define a set of criteria that a student needs to satisfy in order to receive the mid term payment and the final payment. The good news is that Google are clued into open source development enough to allow the mentor the freedom to approve, or otherwise, each payment. So what am I looking for from our GSoC students? As a mentor I want to see them learning about the way open source is developed. I'm not too concerned about code outputs, more about community development. Here at the ASF we say that if we look after the community the code will look after itself. Unfortunately, looking after the code is what most of us geeks do best! In Sinas case he is new to the ASF and therefore has much to learn about how we do things. Worse still he has to learn it faster than the rest of us (For example, it took me years of lurking on ASF lists before I started to get involved. GSoC students have to do it in a few months). I want to see newcomers (not just GSoCers) fully understand the value of the community they are working with. In the private conversation I mentioned at the start of this mail I raise some concerns about Sinas involvement with our community. Sina has recently demonstrated some understanding of the inner workings of Forrest and has even shown signs of engaging with the community (the hardest part). However, he is a long way behind the schedule he set at the start of the programme. Since I'm not worried about the code I wanted to ascertain whether Sina had learned anything about our community. I'm pleased to say that Sina has responded very positively to my observations and has shown a good understanding of what I am hoping to achieve as his mentor. Sina has asked me to help him get over the community engagement hurdle and I am happy to do that. I am his assigned mentor and he should draw on me much more than he has been able to do so to date. having mentors within our community, outside of the GSoC programme, is something that the ASF values a great deal. GSoC is also about us learning to be better mentors. We need to see more involvement on these lists from Sina, this means, when a problem is hit, ask a question. If it is documented, we'll point at the doc, if it is not we'll work on it together (we being the community). There are no stupid questions around here, only unclear documentation. Well done Sina, I look forward to working with you more closely in the second half of the GSoC programme. Ross
