Re: mentoring programs in Debian
Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org writes: I see your point. In these cases, the mentor was more treating the GSoC program as a bounty program or a way to have contractors paid at the expense of somebody else. It wasn't a real mentoring scheme. Ah, yes, that's certainly a problem. This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack (and create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. In fact, some Debian teams already do this, but fail to announce it clearly. When an interested user ask, we tend to say: if you want new version of X in Debian, we need help instead of we welcome new contributors. If you don't have a lot of experience, don't worry, we'll mentor you! Please take a look at this and if you can questions mails us to X and/or join us in IRC or something along these lines :) Indeed. Of course, some of that problem is that mentoring can be a lot of work! This is always one of the challenges for free-time activities; people like doing things that are fun and simple and directly personally rewarding. While mentoring can be that, it isn't always. I've been spending the day poking around on video game forums since one of the tracking sites I'm particularly fond of just redid part of how they do one of their statistical score calculations, and there's a lot of resulting discussion. That prompts me to wonder if mentoring is an area of Debian that would benefit from some sort of gamification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification). I do all sorts of things in video games that I might not otherwise do, and even things that aren't particularly fun, because I get rewarded with an achievement or score of some kind. I think there was some prior discussion of badges and awards inside Debian. I'm not sure if that project ever reached fruition. But I do think that one very effective way to provide an incentive is to reward action with some sort of collectable or score, thereby engaging people's joy of accumulating. The hard part of a good sceme is figuring out what to measure to award badges or score or what have you, since mentoring is somewhat fuzzy and difficult to measure with a computer. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87li9mn5wy@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:54:44AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Ubuntu does https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek - a set of seminars on IRC to teach Ubuntu development. I'm not sure of how useful that is (I've never attended it) and if we should do it too. AFAIK we don't do that inside Debian. But I thought it was worth mentioning. In Debian we mostly do continuous mentoring on all topics on the debian-mentors IRC channel and mailing list rather than specific sessions at specific times. Such things work great if you already know where to get started. If you don't, it might be more difficult. I think it's a normal fact that some people require a bit more handholding than others, at the beginning; but that doesn't mean they're less capable. Having an IRC seminar with basic information on what to do seems like a great way to get started, to me. I guess some folks learn better the other way and might benefit better from specific sessions so it might be interesting to do both. I'm not sure about the full week part though, maybe something more continuous would be good. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caktje6egod-_gr7suruvjwzaopeh5phnylw19u_p167csc4...@mail.gmail.com -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130313070311.gd11...@grep.be
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 13/03/13 at 08:03 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:54:44AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Ubuntu does https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek - a set of seminars on IRC to teach Ubuntu development. I'm not sure of how useful that is (I've never attended it) and if we should do it too. AFAIK we don't do that inside Debian. But I thought it was worth mentioning. In Debian we mostly do continuous mentoring on all topics on the debian-mentors IRC channel and mailing list rather than specific sessions at specific times. Such things work great if you already know where to get started. If you don't, it might be more difficult. I think it's a normal fact that some people require a bit more handholding than others, at the beginning; but that doesn't mean they're less capable. Having an IRC seminar with basic information on what to do seems like a great way to get started, to me. I'm not very up-to-date on the status of Free Software video-conferencing tools, but maybe that's something that could be done that way. Also, for packaging tutorials, we have slides already (hint hint) ;) Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130313075329.gb19...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 2013-03-11 23:56, Ana Guerrero wrote: The question I would love to see answered by you both is: What new schemes of mentoring/integrating new contributors do you envisage we could try in Debian? I'm sure there are more possibilities that I haven't thought of yet, but I can see space for several types. For example: - General new contributors: Recruit people and train them on how to work on topics that interest them. Even if they don't end up working on those topics permanently, it could help draw them into Debian more generally. As well as packaging and coding, these internships could cover design, documentation writing, publicity work, or any other type of Debian role. - Targetted groups: Advertising schemes aimed at students (like GSoC) or women or retired people or any other underrepresented group can help us pull in Debian contributors from a wider pool. - Existing contributors: Some existing contributors might want to participate in the previous type of scheme directly, to learn about a new area. But I can also imagine some team internships that are only open to existing Debian contributors, like the FTPTrainees scheme.[1] These would likely be used by teams to recruit new members, but I think they can also serve a wider purpose than that -- where time and energy is available, it's valuable just to have more people around who understand in detail the type of work done by each team. Within each type, schemes could obviously be longer or shorter/more or less detailed/more about mentoring or shadowing, depending on the resources available. Each of these types has been tried already in specific parts of Debian, so we should of course try to learn from those experiences in running any future wider schemes -- thanks for sharing some of your own thoughts about GSoC. -- Moray [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/09/msg1.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/b675d1872fec9e7566d1199533812...@www.morayallan.com
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 2013-03-12 01:03, Russ Allbery wrote: On the general topic of mentoring, though, I think one of the hardest parts of helping new people join the project is that people need to start with relatively easy tasks so that they can get their feet wet. Yes. Even where there is an existing list of tasks, these will often be too hard to be a good introduction for new people. Or otherwise, easy but boring and not introducing enough aspects of a team's work. Or too urgent to have a working solution for, so that depending on the new person completing one quickly is dangerous and unfair. In some areas it may be better to start with artificial tasks. Already in Debian we have often used artificial tasks in the NM process, as a quick way of checking skills that weren't demonstrated by past activity: e.g. asking how to respond to a specified list of invented bug reports, or asking to find some of the problems in licences that we already know are bad. In some other areas, it might be necessary for people to start just by shadowing the activity of someone experienced. Even these cases can give the new people a real insight into the relevant area of work just from seeing what is done and seeing how decisions are made, and much more so if the experienced people take the time to work through some decisions with them in depth, listening to the person's suggestions before responding with comments from their own experience. -- Moray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e619f6037a66fc178291860feb778...@www.morayallan.com
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 11/03/13 at 21:56 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: [Some sort-of thread hijacking] Hi folks, I see this thread going nowhere and it's a pity because discussing new ways to integrate contributors in Debian is a topic worth discussing. I have been involved in GSoC in the editions 2011 and 2012 and in Code-in 2011. Besides that, I mentored a now DD inside the Debian Women mentoring program. All those mentoring programs were *very* different therefore producing different results. And I'm sure we can use more schemes of recruiting/attracting new contributors. The question I would love to see answered by you both is: What new schemes of mentoring/integrating new contributors do you envisage we could try in Debian? Interesting question. You write about new mentoring schemes, I'm going to extend the scope a bit to improvable schemes. I hope you don't mind. I think we have many different schemes, and I'm not sure that we need to add new ones. But we could optimize some of them a bit. The various schemes are all (or most of them) useful. Different schemes suit different people, so it's important to continue to offer them. So, what do we offer in terms of mentoring in Debian? That's a pretty good question and actually, we should have an overview of that somewhere on the website or the wiki. What I can think about: per-upload mentoring using -mentors@ and mentors.debian.net --- (it's not strictly per-upload, but at least it starts that way) this works quite well. I see two ways we could improve that: - work on the mentors.d.n infrastructure: + include more automated checks by default (packages could be built and tested with piuparts, for example) + include a social dimension (with karma and stuff). People would be able to review others' packages and earn points when comments are good-quality. - localize -mentors. We could have language-specific lists and IRC channels for the languages that are quite well represented in Debian (FR, DE, ES, etc.). Often, the language barrier is a problem for young contributors. list of easy/starting tasks --- We do it, AFAIK: - through bugs tagged 'gift'. This does not work very well. Maybe advertising that more could be enough to improve that. - through listing tasks in the team pages (see the starred ideas on e.g. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby). We need to encourage all teams to have such lists on their pages. mentoring inside teams -- Like https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM. That's a very good idea. We could build a list of teams willing to mentor someone, and publish that list in a call for mentorees. NM process -- Not strictly-speaking mentoring: it would be better if the mentoring happened mostly outside (before) the NM process to relieve the load on the AM. Internship-like (e.g. GSoC) --- That's a nice way to get involved for people who can dedicate a lot of time to Debian for a short period of time. We could explore participation into other programs, such as https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen So, to summarize the key ideas: - build an overview of mentoring schemes offered by Debian - improve mentors.d.n - localize -mentors@ - advertise our lists of easy tasks - develop mentoring inside teams - explore other internship-like programs If elected, that's clearly something I'd like to push. It's also a field where I would welcome help from others. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312121803.ga27...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
Hi Russ, On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 03:03:42PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org writes: - For some DDs in previous years, this seemed to be a way to have students doing stuff from their TODO lists... Just a quick note on this part: I don't think this is inherently a bad idea, although of course it should be something the student is also excited about. But I remember what I was like when I was in high school: I really wanted to program, but I was horrible at coming up with useful things to do. I needed a good problem stream that I could work on and then I enjoyed finding ways to solve the problems. Not everyone is like that, of course, but I do think there are people out there who just want to put skills to use and learn how to do new things but don't know how to select good and useful problems to work on. On the general topic of mentoring, though, I think one of the hardest parts of helping new people join the project is that people need to start with relatively easy tasks so that they can get their feet wet. That often means that one needs to step back and let new people do things that are easy for the mentor, which in turn means leaving easy work undone for long enough to give people a chance to do it. I see your point. In these cases, the mentor was more treating the GSoC program as a bounty program or a way to have contractors paid at the expense of somebody else. It wasn't a real mentoring scheme. This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack (and create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. In fact, some Debian teams already do this, but fail to announce it clearly. When an interested user ask, we tend to say: if you want new version of X in Debian, we need help instead of we welcome new contributors. If you don't have a lot of experience, don't worry, we'll mentor you! Please take a look at this and if you can questions mails us to X and/or join us in IRC or something along these lines :) Ana -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312131416.ga12...@pryan.ekaia.org
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 12/03/13 at 14:14 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: Hi Russ, On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 03:03:42PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org writes: - For some DDs in previous years, this seemed to be a way to have students doing stuff from their TODO lists... Just a quick note on this part: I don't think this is inherently a bad idea, although of course it should be something the student is also excited about. But I remember what I was like when I was in high school: I really wanted to program, but I was horrible at coming up with useful things to do. I needed a good problem stream that I could work on and then I enjoyed finding ways to solve the problems. Not everyone is like that, of course, but I do think there are people out there who just want to put skills to use and learn how to do new things but don't know how to select good and useful problems to work on. On the general topic of mentoring, though, I think one of the hardest parts of helping new people join the project is that people need to start with relatively easy tasks so that they can get their feet wet. That often means that one needs to step back and let new people do things that are easy for the mentor, which in turn means leaving easy work undone for long enough to give people a chance to do it. I see your point. In these cases, the mentor was more treating the GSoC program as a bounty program or a way to have contractors paid at the expense of somebody else. It wasn't a real mentoring scheme. This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack (and create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. Nothing really needs to happen inside GSoC. But GSoC provide several advantages: - there's a rigid framework (deadlines, etc) that help the student organize and focus - the student gets paid by Google - the student gets to mention both Debian and Google on his CV, which is probably seen positively by future recruiters. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312185027.gc8...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On 12/03/13 at 13:18 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: What I can think about: Forgot something: schools/seminars -- Ubuntu does https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek - a set of seminars on IRC to teach Ubuntu development. I'm not sure of how useful that is (I've never attended it) and if we should do it too. AFAIK we don't do that inside Debian. But I thought it was worth mentioning. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312185542.gd8...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:55:42 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: schools/seminars -- Ubuntu does https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek - a set of seminars on IRC to teach Ubuntu development. I'm not sure of how useful that is (I've never attended it) and if we should do it too. AFAIK we don't do that inside Debian. But I thought it was worth mentioning. There have been some IRC Training Sessions organized by the Debian Women team: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen/Projects/Events/TrainingSessions Cheers, gregor -- .''`. Homepage: http://info.comodo.priv.at/ - OpenPGP key 0xBB3A68018649AA06 : :' : Debian GNU/Linux user, admin, and developer - http://www.debian.org/ `. `' Member of VIBE!AT SPI, fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe `- NP: Bob Dylan: It's All Good signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 07:50:27PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: On 12/03/13 at 14:14 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: .. This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack (and create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. Nothing really needs to happen inside GSoC. But GSoC provide several advantages: - there's a rigid framework (deadlines, etc) that help the student organize and focus - the student gets paid by Google - the student gets to mention both Debian and Google on his CV, which is probably seen positively by future recruiters. Yeah, and also the GSoC have a huge disadvantage, it is available only to a tiny small percentage of the population who have the privilege of getting a higher education, then only if their school load and life responsibilities allow them to participate in the program. It would also be good for us to encourage our own programs to a wider and diverse population, instead of relying exclusively on the rules set by a non-free-software company. And assuming that students want non-free-software companies on their CV. Your whole point here somehow seems to be against this internship idea While you seemed to agree previously that all of these internship-like things (GSoC, NM, team-trainee, ...) are good. Ana -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312205610.ga30...@pryan.ekaia.org
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On Tue 12 Mar 2013 17:56:10 Ana Guerrero escribió: [snip] Yeah, and also the GSoC have a huge disadvantage, it is available only to a tiny small percentage of the population who have the privilege of getting a higher education, then only if their school load and life responsibilities allow them to participate in the program. Without taking into account that summer is happening just in the northern hemisphere. In the remaining of the globe, we are not on holidays. -- Esperando confirmación de ingredientes necesarios que serán expuestos a la radiación... Manera geek de expresar que se espera la compra de carne para un típico asado argentino. Silvio Rikemberg. Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer http://perezmeyer.com.ar/ http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
Hi, On 12/03/13 at 21:56 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 07:50:27PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: On 12/03/13 at 14:14 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: .. This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack (and create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. Nothing really needs to happen inside GSoC. But GSoC provide several advantages: - there's a rigid framework (deadlines, etc) that help the student organize and focus - the student gets paid by Google - the student gets to mention both Debian and Google on his CV, which is probably seen positively by future recruiters. Yeah, and also the GSoC have a huge disadvantage, it is available only to a tiny small percentage of the population who have the privilege of getting a higher education, then only if their school load and life responsibilities allow them to participate in the program. It would also be good for us to encourage our own programs to a wider and diverse population, instead of relying exclusively on the rules set by a non-free-software company. And assuming that students want non-free-software companies on their CV. Your whole point here somehow seems to be against this internship idea While you seemed to agree previously that all of these internship-like things (GSoC, NM, team-trainee, ...) are good. You wrote: This kind of mentoring let's package this new software stack [..] doesn't need to happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. I agree that this kind of mentoring can happen already in Debian, but that's not a reason not to do it in GSoC. I was pointing that GSoC offers several advantages that might not be easy to offer in other programs. I think that it would be better to talk about mentoring schemes rather than internship-like things. I'm not sure if it's a cultural issue, but in my mind, internship go with working full time. I think that it's good to have a wide variety of mentoring schemes, to address different needs and possibilities, in terms of available time, of status, of focus, etc. And I also think that in terms of internship programs (=~ full-time work inside the project during the summer), we should explore joining other programs and/or creating our own. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130312214431.gd10...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Ubuntu does https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek - a set of seminars on IRC to teach Ubuntu development. I'm not sure of how useful that is (I've never attended it) and if we should do it too. AFAIK we don't do that inside Debian. But I thought it was worth mentioning. In Debian we mostly do continuous mentoring on all topics on the debian-mentors IRC channel and mailing list rather than specific sessions at specific times. I guess some folks learn better the other way and might benefit better from specific sessions so it might be interesting to do both. I'm not sure about the full week part though, maybe something more continuous would be good. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caktje6egod-_gr7suruvjwzaopeh5phnylw19u_p167csc4...@mail.gmail.com
Re: mentoring programs in Debian
Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org writes: - For some DDs in previous years, this seemed to be a way to have students doing stuff from their TODO lists... Just a quick note on this part: I don't think this is inherently a bad idea, although of course it should be something the student is also excited about. But I remember what I was like when I was in high school: I really wanted to program, but I was horrible at coming up with useful things to do. I needed a good problem stream that I could work on and then I enjoyed finding ways to solve the problems. Not everyone is like that, of course, but I do think there are people out there who just want to put skills to use and learn how to do new things but don't know how to select good and useful problems to work on. On the general topic of mentoring, though, I think one of the hardest parts of helping new people join the project is that people need to start with relatively easy tasks so that they can get their feet wet. That often means that one needs to step back and let new people do things that are easy for the mentor, which in turn means leaving easy work undone for long enough to give people a chance to do it. I think this can be a real struggle with mature teams. I know I'm not the only person in Debian with a strong interest in time management techniques (it's even already come up in candidate statements), and one thing that's virtually universal in time management literature is that one should do easy things immediately rather than letting them accumulate. Part of what I've always found challenging in mentoring is that I have to step back and *not* follow my normal work process to give someone else a chance to work through the easy things that will help them build familiarity with the overall structure. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874nghoapt@windlord.stanford.edu
