(this is a copy of the mail sent to the packagers mailing list mageia-dev. I'm sending it to the marcom team too because I thing that marcom people could be fit for the job)

Hello to everyone,

I'm sure there's someone among you who wants to help Mageia but hasn't found

yet the good way to do it. Today is your lucky day, because there's a job

that's available and can be really useful and interesting: coordinating the

packagers mentoring program.

You know that one key point of success for Mageia is in the ability to welcome

new packagers. The better we will be at it, the better the distro will be. The

packagers mentoring program has been created for that reason and several

packagers have been or are being mentored. But we have some difficulty knowing

who is being mentored by who and who hasn't found a mentor. And we need also

to find more mentors and more apprentices.

During a packagers weekly meeting, misc invited us to read the following

article about mentoring programs in open-source projects:

http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/05/31/effective-mentoring-programs/

I invite those who haven't read it yet, to read it. I'll quote one of the

mentoring best practices that were given: "In bigger projects, keeping track

of who is a mentor, and who is mentoring who, and inviting new mentors, and

ensuring that no-one falls through the cracks when a mentor gets too busy, is

a job of itself."

I'm looking for someone who could fill that "job".

Description of the job:

- keep track of:

-- who's being mentored by who, how well it's going

-- who needs a mentor and hasn't found one yet (this is one of the most

important parts: no volunteer must be forgotten, volunteers are too precious

!)

-- who can mentor more apprentices (and sometimes convince packagers to become

mentors or accept one more apprentice)

- be available for questions from apprentices or mentors, by mail, and if

possible, to be present on the IRC channel #mageia-mentoring on freenode

- help mentors with gathering "junior tasks" (bugzilla is a never empty

reserve that can be used for that. Maybe ask the bug triage team to help

identify such tasks. Maybe a "junior task" keyword in bugzilla would do the

trick)

-- small bugs to fix

-- new small packages to import in the distribution

-- backports

- promote mentoring (empower users into contributers. Working with the

marketing team would be great I think):

-- make the mentoring program known (MLs, forums, web, etc.)

-- look for new apprentices

-- look for new mentors

Some useful skills:

- be autonomous (ie no need to check that you're doing the work)

- good written english (communication is very important in this job)

- knowledge about packaging is a plus but not mandatory (the key aspects can

be taught to you)

- being or having been a mentor, or having been mentored would be a plus, but

not mandatory

More information about the job:

- does not require a big amount of work, but real committment to the task and

regularity

- remember that you have a coordination role, not an authoritative role. The

difference in that is that you're not here to give orders but to facilitate the

mentoring program.

- you don't have to be alone to do this job if it's too much for one person:

you can find other helpful people wanting to help you if needed and rely on the

other teams (but finding them is part of your job ;) ).

- this "job offer" concerns everything that revolves around the mentoring of

new packagers, but if it's successful maybe other teams can follow the same

approach (i18n, QA, etc... ).

- depending on your level of confidence, experience and will, you could be

helped in your work. Maybe someone from the council can supervise and help you

at least at the beginning; or, if no one steps up, I can help you bootstrap

and organize your new "job".

So, who's in?

Samuel Verschelde