[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel] Proposal: moving "assisting mentors" back to role for GSoC 2020
James Cameron
quozl at laptop.org
Fri Mar 13 19:33:36 EDT 2020
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
We should continue talking about this to move toward consensus.
We have until 14th April to finish the discussion.
Many of your responses didn't address the issues raised in the GSoC
mentors mailing list thread, so I've sent a copy of the thread to
those who didn't quote from it. As it is a private mailing list, I've
not made it public, and ask that you respect the privacy of the other
GSoC mentors.
An alternate proposal is to change "assisting mentor" to "other
developers" in our project ideas list. This should properly capture
the need for a student to involve everyone listed in a project.
If you're one of the "assisting mentors" now, your assistance in the
projects is critical, and the students will be directed to work with
you as well as the mentors. It's just that you wouldn't be nominated
as mentor as far as GSoC is concerned.
Our obligation is to the students to provide effective and mature
mentoring. Our aim is to get students to stay with Sugar Labs after
GSoC.
For people who want to be mentors, GSoC guides say you need to be able
to spend six hours a week on it, and have the necessary skills to
guide, teach, and use the programming languages and technical tools
that the student will use.
As a GSoC organisation administrator, I need to be confident that the
mentors we list can do all this. I need to see evidence; commits,
pull requests, issues, mailing list discussion, IRC.
Especially I need to see that you have six hours a week you could have
been spending on Sugar Labs right now. I can certainly see that in
Lionel, Walter, Ibiam, Sumit, Iqra, Favour, Vaibhav, Ashish, Hrishi
and Michaël. That's a huge list. We're doing fine in that respect.
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 09:57:21AM -0400, Devin Ulibarri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I expect that the project [1]"## Music Blocks Scale Degree vs n^th Modal Pitch"
> would be near impossible without my assistance.
>
> Also, my resume is never benefited thus far from any of these things. I have
> never gotten a job from putting these things on a resume. The "problem" is that
> I identify myself as a musician, and music career jobs do not care to see GSoC
> on the resume.
>
> At any rate, I am happy to help. In particular, I want to stamp out this design
> issue as it is it seems to me to be the last big design issue for all the basic
> functions of a visual programming language.
>
> Devin
>
> On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 09:27 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
>
> I think it is not hard to judge who wants to mentor from passion vs
> something to put on a resume. Let's leave it to the project leaders to make
> those calls. That said, mentors should have demonstrable experience of
> relevant contributions.
>
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 8:02 AM Samson Goddy <[2]samsongoddy at sugarlabs.org>
> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> The quicker we understand that Sugar Labs is an "educational project,"
> then the better for us, we have been battling on matters that in "my
> opinion" is pointless. That said, First, I don't understand the whole
> point for labeling someone an "assistant mentor," this is a
> community we need to be sensitive to what put out there. First, I
> listed myself as an "assistant mentor" not because I cannot code, but
> because I am focusing on the other part of the "community" which is
> keeping things healthy and welcoming, we are all volunteers, we should
> respect that fact.
>
> Honestly removing me from GSoC because of "expect the previous
> assistant mentors to either promote themselves to the position of
> mentor by showing their expertise or be content with participation
> within the wider Sugar Labs community." At the same time, I can easily
> prove that by sending PRs, I don't think the same applies to folks that
> cannot code, again I wasn't born in the 80s, but I am sure in 2020,
> there is more aspect to software than just coding. Let us stop doing
> things that will drive folks away; everyone is important.
>
> I am not an org admin; I grew up with Sugar, correctly understand how
> Sugar was created but chose to focus primarily on something that will
> keep "Sugar Labs" healthy. I don't see how having extra folks into a
> project as "mentors" will hurt the student performance. It gives the
> student a more broad knowledge of what to do to make the project
> usable, maintainable, and scalable.
>
> We have more important things to focus on than argue about assistant
> mentorship.
>
> Regards
>
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 12:23 PM Lionel Laské <[3]
> lionel.laske at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi James,
>
> Thanks for this.
>
> I think that assisting mentor notion has no sense.
> We need to have one mentor that lead the project with some
> co-mentors to supply him when/if he's unavailable. Each mentor
> could ask help or advice to other members of the community if
> needed, we don't need to identify these guys as "Assisting mentor".
>
> As Stephanie said in the thread you mention: "Unfortunately some
> people want to be a mentor because they think it will look good on
> their resume, these are not the folks you want to be mentoring
> students.". I'm afraid it's the same thing with "Assisting mentor".
>
> Regards.
>
> Lionel.
>
>
> Le ven. 13 mars 2020 à 08:31, <[4]
> sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org> a écrit :
>
> Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2020 16:55:16 +1100
> From: James Cameron <[5]quozl at laptop.org>
> To: [6]sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Proposal: moving "assisting mentors"
> back to
> the community role for GSoC 2020
> Message-ID: <[7]20200313055516.GM28657 at laptop.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Walter and I are your organisation administrators for GSoC
> 2020.
>
> On the GSoc Mentors mailing list from 8th March and still going
> is a
> thread "Deadline to invite mentors" which morphed into the
> expertise
> required of mentors to do a project [1].
>
> After putting forward the Sugar Labs compromise practice of
> "coding
> mentors" and "assistant mentors", there has been both criticism
> and
> support for the practice from other organisation
> administrators. The
> criticism has been voluminous and well stated. The support
> comparatively muted.
>
> I'd like to hear what the Sugar Labs community thinks now.
>
> The effect of the change [2] can be seen here [3].
>
> In implementing the change we would;
>
> - require _all_ project communication to be carried out in the
> open,
> on GitHub, mailing list, or IRC,
>
> - expect the previous assistant mentors to either promote
> themselves
> to the position of mentor by showing their expertise, or be
> content
> with participation within the wider Sugar Labs community.
>
> - remove from the dashboard the previous assistant mentors who
> are no
> longer listed against a project,
>
> What do you think?
>
> References:
>
> 1. [8]https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/
> google-summer-of-code-mentors-list/
> CAJzXzVEkw%2BOT6nSXvTraNaNqNdR6h0mbjFtaejJcUnueU4YX4Q%40mail.gmail.com
>
> 2. [9]https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/pull/94
>
> 3. [10]https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/tree/simplify
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> [11]Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> [12]http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
> References:
>
> [1] https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/pull/94/commits/d4ef7c33eeb2e1c2c36156c8abee3062f49d89e8#r392238290
> [2] mailto:samsongoddy at sugarlabs.org
> [3] mailto:lionel.laske at gmail.com
> [4] mailto:sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org
> [5] mailto:quozl at laptop.org
> [6] mailto:sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> [7] mailto:20200313055516.GM28657 at laptop.org
> [8] https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-summer-of-code-mentors-list/CAJzXzVEkw%2BOT6nSXvTraNaNqNdR6h0mbjFtaejJcUnueU4YX4Q%40mail.gmail.com
> [9] https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/pull/94
> [10] https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/tree/simplify
> [11] mailto:Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> [12] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
--
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/
More information about the Sugar-devel
mailing list