to;dr;: I bring up some points below that Marvin already addressed well later in his reply. In short, I still think we need a way to address absentee mentors that doesn't overburden the report manager.
I'm relatively new to the ipmc, so forgive me up front if I'm opening up old wounds... I know there have been related threads. > On Dec 2, 2015, at 5:53 PM, Marvin Humphrey <mar...@rectangular.com> wrote: > > It's not a concern -- it's a blessing. The shepherd institution needs to die. Then I'd say let it die. My only concern is that that it offers a way for non-members an entry path to the ipmc. If we eliminate it, there should be an alternative for new IPMC candidates to show interest and demonstrate merit. > > There's been a shepherd shortage for years. What happened this month > is that I took a bunch of people who were effectively inactive out of > the shepherd rolls, so their absence is more obvious at the top of the > report. > > The expectation that it is shepherds who review and comment on podling > reports, rather than Mentors, is harmful. That seems like a problem with documentation of the shepherd role -- and varying degrees of individual interpretations. I see a lot of podlings with deadbeat mentors (e.g. Ones that offer to mentor a proposal, then go dark until graduation and suddenly reappear). I think we need a way to address that. If mentors are absent, what's the fallback if there are no shepherds? Is it the IPMC self-policing such things? I'd like to say just change the text from "shepherd/mentor notes" to "IPMC/mentor notes", but that could open up a whole can of worms. > > Furthermore, shepherds do not fulfill their original purpose of > preventing problem podings from falling through the cracks. That > problem is more effectively addressed by having the Report Manager > flag podlings who have failed to turn in a signed-off report for 2 > months running. > Excellent point. Checking the box is easy. Digging into mailing lists to see if mentors are actually engaged is a different story, and is a lot of work for the report manager (if that's who is responsible for it). > For those who value cross-podling feedback, the best opportunity for > that is to comment on the DRAFT report, spawning rich conversations on > general@incubator. I'll be sending out that DRAFT next Monday. > That seems like a great forum for such discussions, and provides a way for non-ASF members to show involvement in the incubator. There could still be cases where podlings (or their mentors) fall through the cracks, but I would hope that such cases are eventually caught and corrected. > Marvin Humphrey -Taylor --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
