[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris mentoring program...

[Jim Grisanzio]

elw at stderr.org wrote:
>> Subject: [advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris mentoring program...
>>
>> I wanted to bounce an idea off of you guys.
>>
>> What do you think of a mentoring program. Senior developers would be 
>> paired with junior developers to learn various aspects of OS 
>> development. We would do outreach to university compsci programs. (this 
>> doesn't exclude non-students as mentees)


Love the idea. :) And I'd be happy to help.


> I think that this is a fantastic idea, and one well worth some discussion 
> (and pursuit of).
> 
> Some thoughts:
> 
> 1) How to build a pool of experienced people?  Just ask for volunteers?


We have some experience teaming up people in the request-sponsor program 
and the Google Summer of Code program. So at least we may have some 
models to discuss as we figure this out. I think it would require 
someone to go out and get people involved after we have a shell of a 
program outline. We have a lot of lists, communities, projects, and user 
groups now, so it would take some legwork to build a pool of mentors. 
But there's no reason why we couldn't start small and build up and out.


> 2) Development of early stage spin-up educational materials (e.g.,
>     tutorials) for folks just coming to the table.  Some of the assumptions
>     that experienced admin users have (of how an installation works, etc.)
>     are fairly foreign to new developers.
> 
> 3) Advocating participation to junior developers, people acquiring new
>     tools, etc: how do you make a mentorship program maximally attractive
>     to folks who may be coming from a wide range of backgrounds and prior
>     experiences?  [This is, I think, something that we should be conscious
>     of paralleling the linux-to-solaris conversion process that Project
>     Indiana seeks to cultivate...]
> 
> 4) Practical exercises / tasks for people new to the table.  It would be
>     great to have a few more people triaging out bugs that are
>     "newbie-friendly" and just require legwork or simple fixes/updates by
>     someone who's interested in learning the tools - this requires a little
>     more resource committment from the community, by dedicating a couple
>     people's time to task identification / fix-wrangling, but would
>     significantly enhance the ease with which new contributors can come to
>     the table.  Better documentation / workflow description, here, would
>     sure be helpful.


More bite size bugs and more people involved?
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/communities/participation/
That would be really, really excellent.

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris