Hi Russell!

"Russell Penney" <russell.penney at tincanct.com> wrote:
> Goran said:
> <SNIP>
> > I liked your idea on mentoring and since you want me to listen I want to
> > hear more. Can you write us some concrete proposal on how we all could
> > get some mentoring going? How do newbies find mentors? How is the
> > mentoring done? How do mentors make themselves available? How do we
> > present such an idea to the community? etc.
> > 
> > I have taught OO etc to programmers and like to teach, so this is an
> > aspect I like. And there are lots of people into teaching in this
> > community. You have my ear.
> 
> Damn, now *I* have to do something rather than just sit and snipe from the
> sidelines. You take the fun out of everything! :)

Hehe, well that was the general idea. :) But I am also dead serious.

> Ok, here goes.
> 
> I see a lot of people willing to help and usually the response is "Great,
> start doing something". This is the wrong approach IMHO because there is NO
> documentation that is up to date on what needs doing, NO help forthcoming
> when they ask for more information and NO central body whose job it is to
> support these people.

Right. Eh, I know it sounds odd to refer to a report that I haven't yet
sent out (waiting for Marcus to approve it) but in that report you will
find a link to our up-to-now-private-but-just-opened-up-readonly swiki
area where we have a collection of "burning issues". I think you will
find a few listed there that maps to this. So... these problems are at
least listed now. That is always a first step :)

> So ...
> Have a look at the Debian process (seeing people keep talking about it as a
> model). http://qa.debian.org/howto.html is one place to start.

Yes, Debian is nice to look at.

> We need a list somewhere of all the tasks that need doing which is kept up
> to date by somebody or somebodies. Create statistics that show how many
> tasks were completed, "Hey everybody 125 bugs were solved this month!!!!
> That's 50 more than last month" or "Another 43 class comments were written"
> or ... you get the drift.

Oh yes.

> If someone wants to help, assign one of the "mentors" to them. The mentor
> can guide them, based on their skills, on the jobs that need doing and
> supply motivation. Start them with some basic tasks to find the level they
> are comfortable at. "Hey can you write the class comment for class X" or
> "can you categorise this class's methods into core and enhancements" or etc.

And how do we find mentors? Would you be willing to be a mentor? And if
there is hesitation among us to be mentors - what is it based on,
perhaps something we can relieve?

> Of course the biggest problem is that all these things are useless without
> some way of getting them into Squeak. IMHO that is the biggest problem you
> face and no amount of rushing to get to 3.9 will make any difference because
> you haven't solved the underlying problems.

"into Squeak" - you mean getting them to learn and get productive?

> Russell

regards, Göran