On Sun, Jun 15, 2025 at 8:11 AM Justin Mclean <jus...@classsoftware.com> wrote:
> > All mentors arrive with a lot of knowledge of ASF, and usually of > incubation too, so that doesn’t need to be taught. > > This I’m not so sure about. While many mentors do have solid ASF > experience, we can’t always assume they’re familiar with all the nuances of > incubation. Mentor backgrounds vary, some have never been on an incubating > project, or have only seen a couple of very specific paths. Similarly, > podlings differ significantly in the level of support they require. Some > come with strong open source experience and a good grasp of how the ASF > works, while others are entirely new to both. Even experienced mentors may > find themselves supporting a podling very different from any they’ve worked > with before, so sharing mentors’ knowledge seems like a good idea. > The way I see it, mentor onboarding is particularly important when someone is a mentor for the first time. A call or process to onboard the specific project is also a good idea, but if someone already mentored other projects, they may not need the mentor onboarding each time. I'm of course relatively new to ASF (and not a mentor, but not my first project either) and from my experience so far I would not at all expect to know everything if I was signing up to be a mentor. If the mentor comes from a project that started 10-20 years ago, the practices in that project may not be fully up to date with the sophistication of process that would happen here, when everyone is particularly focused on teaching and learning the apache way of doing things. Also, there is a lot happening in the incubator that doesn't happen in graduated projects, for example release votes happen twice, monthly reports are approved multiple times, etc. henrik
