Hi, On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 11:49 AM, ant elder <ant.el...@gmail.com> wrote: > I accept there might be some poddlings where the mentors are AWOL but > most of the ones I know of the mentors are actually paying attention > but there is only so much mentors can do if the poddling isn't very > active.
Right, a mentor that just takes care of the responsibilities described in [1] can't do much in such a case. However, a mentor with experience in growing open source communities and willingness to share it (plus the required time and energy) can do much more. Projects like PDFBox or River are living examples of how active mentoring can turn around the fortunes of a project. Most of the cases I've been involved so far of podlings in the "hoping some more people come along" have had symptoms of the project team not paying enough attention on making it easy for new contributors to show up and stick around. Things like complex and undocumented build steps, missing "Getting started" or "Getting involved" guides, lack of quick and positive feedback to newcomers, etc., are all too common. Fixing even just some of such things will dramatically increase the odds of new people showing up. Those are things that are very easy to overlook when you're working on your first open source projects (it took me years to learn those lessons), but we here have a massive amount of collective experience on such things. That's what we could and IMHO should be sharing with the podlings. That's what "mentoring" to me is about and that's where our most precious "added value" is. Otherwise incubation just boils down to an indoctrination period on how to apply and conform to the various Apache rules and policies. > Sam, from your comments I take it that you think the Incubator should > be doing more in those situations, what else should we do with those > type of poddlings? As outlined above, I think there's a lot more we could collectively do to help such podlings. In the recent years we've spent a lot of time focusing on procedural and legal details, while community building and social dynamics haven't gotten much attention. Perhaps we should start looking at how to build up that aspect of the Incubator, possibly in cooperation with ComDev as already mentioned. Instead of introducing new rules and responsibilities to address this issue, I think what we could do is to start collecting things like case studies and best practices from podlings that have managed to solve commonly seen issues. Or we could form a "community building task force" of say a few volunteers who could be called in to help podlings that have trouble with this. Or something else; I think there's a lot of opportunities for improvement here. [1] http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Roles_and_Responsibilities.html#Mentor BR, Jukka Zitting --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
