On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 7:43 AM, Fabian Affolter <fab(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Hi guys,
I would like to give you a heads up about the discussion
yesterday during the Ambassadors Barcamp session.
We discussed two points extensively: Mentoring and level of activity
(again). I will only cover the first point because the latter one we
discussed in the past to death with no real solution.
A couple of weeks ago Jörg (kital) Simon stepped back from FAMA
(Fedora Ambassadors Membership Administration). Now Clint is in
charge. This means that Clint is handling the administrative part.
Thanks again to kital for all the years of doing the work of FAMA and
all the improvements he made to the process over those years. I am
curious to see what ideas herlo has for improvement on the FAMA end of
this after he gets in the groove of processing applications.
In EMEA we are missing mentors. This will be fixed soon. Right now
we
nominated four additional people to become mentors. Those people were
not selected randomly, they agreed to do the mentoring.
This is good I think. Mentoring is challenging at times now and people
do need to take breaks from it. Having some additional good mentors in
the pool can only help.
An other issue regarding the mentoring is the process. As far as I
know people apply in FAS for the Ambassadors groups. This generates a
mail to all sponsors of the ambassadors group and then a ticket in the
FAMA trac instance is manually created. Then some foo (like suscribing
to the mailing list, search a mentor, etc.) comes and at the end the
person gets sponsored. After that this person is an ambassador.
I think some important steps are omitted in the above description.
FAMA does some preliminary work with the trac and mailing list, sends
important information to the applicant about first steps that must be
completed. Once those are finished then the applicant must choose a
mentor (and the mentor must agree). Once the mentor approves the
application then FAMA cleans things up and we have a new ambassador. A
candidate now needs to do quite a lot more than randomly apply for the
group in FAS.
One idea is to do it similar to the Packager group. This means that
people have to apply for their membership in the FAMA trac instance
first (perhaps fill out a template or similar) instead of the Fedora
Account System and the ambassadors groups become an "invite-only"
group. Then the process starts and at the end they are added to the
ambassadors group. I think that this will filter out all the people
how just apply for any random group in FAS. The barrier to become an
ambassador will not be elevated but people have to show some
commitment first by filling out the trac ticket.
I'm confused by the "invite-only" part of this. If anyone can open
such a trac ticket how is that "invite-only?"
Before an applicant gets to a mentor there are now several things they
must do to demonstrate some commitment. They must create a wiki page
for example. They must seek out a mentor and convince that mentor to
work with them. Those are hurdles that "protect" the mentors from most
whim applications now.
FAMA on the other hand does have to deal with those who join the group
in FAS and then disappear almost immediately without doing any or only
a few additional steps. If the goal is to improve the FAMA experience
then I'm sort of inclined to wait for herlo to get some experience
with it and propose or change it to work well for him. Since I'm not
in the FAMA trenches I really don't know how onerous the process is to
FAMA. It does not seem overly onerous to me as a mentor currently.
If you want to add more details, other thoughts (please only about
mentoring and its process), or if you have a ultimate solution for the
mentoring please speak up. Thanks.
While I'm not quite sure what is meant here by "invite-only" I do want
to say that my instincts are that the ambassadors group even giving
the impression that it is a group formed by invitation only is a bad
idea. There is some overhead to dealing with people not well-suited to
be ambassadors trying to join, there are also costs to not having an
open membership process too.
Things I often hear that just seem at odds with invitation only group
membership:
* Anyone can join the Fedora Project.
* Anyone can contribute, we'll help you find a place to help.
* You don't need to ask permission - just go do it.
All of that big talk loses its punch when coming from a group you
can't join except by invitation.
Many of the recent ambassadors I have mentored who I believe to be
tremendous assets to the project I met for the first time when they
contacted me to request that I mentor them. I would not have invited
them since I did not even know them at the time. While an open
membership process surely gets some random people just trying to join
everything it also makes it easy for really good people to introduce
themselves to us and show us that they are interested in being
ambassadors.
John