On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 4:22 AM, Mani A<[email protected]> wrote: > I do not think the strategy is sufficiently perfect. Such people > should be made to write complete developer-level documentation under a > mentor preferably as well (in the FOSS project). Language skills > cannot be handled properly in a FOSS development environment without > special mentoring. >
I understand the need for a mentor as a person whom one can approach when stuck. But I always get the feeling that when we talk about mentoring we almost always talk about it in the sense of hand-holding/spoon-feeding. The one person to go to to get your medicine bottle opened or your fly pulled up. That just won't happen in FOSS and if we're trying to do that here, it is very disappointing. What counts in FOSS is the ability to stand on your own feet and do your thing. Doesn't matter if you're wrong -- people will correct you if what you are doing matters. And those very people are your mentors in the unofficial sense. Yes, you need ambassadors to promote the concept of FOSS, the beauty of FOSS, but they will not be there to walk you through list etiquette or follow up on you to make sure you sign up to a project or tell you what goes in each registration field. Nor are there going to be programmer-mentors teaching you to code in C. You need to have the motivation to do that yourself. FOSS is the platform where students can understand how amazing it is to be independent and learn from some really intelligent people as peers and not demigods. You can see what they do, understand how they do it, replicate if you want and once you're good enough, improve upon it. You can see how they can also go wrong in so many cases and understand that it is not criminal to be wrong, or to fail. And as for language skills -- if you're talking about the mere ability to speak in English or write perfect grammar then no, FOSS is not the place to learn that. In fact I haven't seen to many grammar pedants in the FOSS programming scenario -- you have to be if you're contributing to documentation though :) If you're talking about etiquette like writing clear complete statements (without the sms style 'ma frenz'), politeness, professional behaviour, honesty, etc. then FOSS is the perfect place to be. There's nothing better to straighten you out than a flame (or in some rare cases, a polite reply) to post according to list guidelines. -- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.in -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
