Folks, Based on a lot of discussion on general@incubator, I've become persuaded that mentoring can be as much a matter of just being a member of the community as of hanging off the side and supervising and coaching. So, since I have some relevant skills in the area of Maven and releases, I'm just in the pool here. Heck, I might even write some code if something comes up.
There's a risk, of course, that I'll accidentally throw weight around. So I'm sending this email, just to be perfectly clear: If I don't explicitly wear my mentor hat, I'm just another member of the community, and anyone should feel free to call me out, disagree with me, whatever. (Of course, even if I do send an _ex cathedra_ statement, anyone is free to appeal to other authorities.) The other mentors of this project are free to join me or not in this mode of operation; in fact, it might be a bit of a safety net of some of them don't. Now, speaking as a mentor, one of the biggest hurdles of a new community formed in part from people who have worked on the code for a living is to get more people speaking up and participating in the decision-making process. So I'm actively looking for cases where there's a perhaps latent decision that can be pulled up and made blatant. --benson
