Aaron,
Thanks for stepping up and accepting this.
My only .02 on this is you have to be careful about this accellerated
role, and here is why...
In open source, there is no age limit. In fact I believe one of the
main/lead Firefox committers was in his early teens...so committership
should not be offered just because someone becomes an intern. Due to
the fact we have no barrier to entry, including age, nothing prevents a
person from becoming a committer on thier own merits. Anyone can
contribute and play in the sandbox.
My point really is that we have a community that everyone deserves to
enter the geronimo team by hard work, and to accellerate someone due to
internship kind of breaks the rules and may cause some alienation in the
community...especially those who have spent time helping out and have
not been offered committership.
I think the point of being a mentor is to help walk a person through the
process and how things are done...show the open source way and hopefully
have some cool code to show for it at the end of the day. But that
should be done without causing community heartburn.
Here is an idea...
What about an Apache "Summer of Code" ACL for SVN? This allows the
intern to not be an actual committer, but allows them to get the SVN
feel on an opensource project. It would offer a good balance for being
a mentor without causing bad feelings for those who have contributed and
have not been offered committership. What do you think?
Jeff
Aaron Mulder wrote:
All,
I volunteered to be a mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and
there were a number of applications for Geronimo. I'm hopeful that at
least one of them will be accepted.
If that happens, we need to decide how to treat the student for
the duration of the project (in terms of committership). This is kind of
a special case in that the program is only a little over 2 months long,
which means normally we probably wouldn't have made the person a committer
in that time frame. But given that one of the goals is to teach the
person how to contribute to open source, it seems to me like we wouldn't
be doing them justice if we didn't give them commit for at least part of
the project.
I'd propose that if this goes through, we put the student on an
"accelerated plan" where we have them contribute their initial work via
patches, review and provide feedback, and then if all goes well offer them
commit within the first 2-4 weeks. We will then need to evaluate their
situation at the end of the program (both their contributions and their
availability to work with us in the future) and decide whether to end
their commit status or not (without any prejudice if we do decide to end
it for whatever reason).
So I'd love to get everyone's feedback on whether this seems OK.
I specifically want this to be a "special case" -- I don't want to apply
this to anyone else. I understand that there are a lot of people in the
community who work hard and contribute and have not been offered commit,
and I don't want to offend anyone or make anyone feel underappreciated,
but I do personally feel like mentoring a student to be a future open
source developer under the terms of this program requires more than simply
asking them to submit patches.
Let me know!
Thanks,
Aaron
