I hear what you’re saying. As a metric it’s better than nothing, but let’s not assume it is telling us everything.
I believe that asking all mentors to sign off is a change in policy or at least in practice. (Neither the “Mentors’ guide”[1] nor the “Guide to being a mentor”[2] talks about signing off.) This could be a useful opportunity to remind mentors of what is expected of them. One gray area has always bugged me. How hard should mentors push a podling to submit a report? If the podling fails to submit a report, or submits it late, it is impossible for mentors to sign off, and therefore counts as a black mark against the mentors. I believe that mentors should facilitate and guide, but pushing and nagging is counterproductive. Julian [1] https://incubator.apache.org/guides/mentor.html <https://incubator.apache.org/guides/mentor.html> [2] https://community.apache.org/guide-to-being-a-mentor.html <https://community.apache.org/guide-to-being-a-mentor.html> > On Sep 1, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Justin Mclean <jus...@classsoftware.com> wrote: > > Hi, > >> There is a strong presumption here that a mentor is fulfilling their duty if >> and only if they sign the reports. > > It’s an imperfect metric but one we have easy access to. If we send out an > email asking for if you’re AWOL and a mentor responds that they are active > then all is good. Of course it’s not going to catch mentors who sign reports > and do nothing else but I hope there’s only a few incidences of that. > >> I’m skeptical. I can think of cases where an engaged mentor does not sign >> reports (because someone else has done it), and vice versa where a >> disengaged mentor shows up once a quarter to sign the report. > > IMO The reports should be signed off by all mentors where possible not just > one or two, that way the mentor only signing reports (and doing nothing else) > is less of an issue. > >> It may be a bit more difficult to measure, but I think a better indicator >> would be the number of messages sent by the mentor to dev and private lists. >> It indicates both time spent writing the message and also time spent keeping >> up with the email traffic to know when the podling needs help. > > Given we have 100+ people to check and some of them are involved in multiple > projects, that’s a lot of lists to check but it would be possible. I could > put it up in a shared doc and if other people help out then it wouldn’t be > too much effort. > > Alternately I could take 10 mentors at random if any of them are active on > their mailing lists, I’m guessing there a strong correlation between not > signing off reports and absent mentors. > > Thanks, > Justin > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org >
