Re: Mentorship program

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

This in reply to an email Samy had mailed to 'core' [1].  Samy, as some
might already know, has resigned from the 'core' team to pursue this
idea more fully among other reasons (Samy's pursuit should certify to
people his immense passion to this topic and his utmost commitment in
attaining it).  It should also be mentioned that the mentoring program
will be rolled-out under the OpenArabia.org (OAO for short) umbrella.
OAO is still very much a work-in-progress with alot more details to
come.

--- Samy Al Bahra <samy at kerneled dot org> wrote:
> I believe that every new committer must be assigned a mentor. A new
> committer must tunnel any changes to code through his mentor for
> acceptance into the code base to make sure of quality. Once the new
> committer gains enough experience and the mentor feels that he is ready,
> the committer would then be ready for mentorship of other new developers
> and gains the ability to commit to his own projects with no approval of
> other developers (as long as it isn't major). This is the process used
> by FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/etc...

This all sounds great and well-intentioned but the truth of the matter is
that the number of people willing to do this within Arabeyes will be very
small since time is _so_ limited for most.  We have a shortage of people
already and our throughput of late has been very limited - to be honest
I don't think we should pursue anything of this caliber until we have 5-8x
the number of active developers we do now.

> I believe our first process is to go through all current code, heavily
> comment it and assure quality. We need to set standards in our code, I
> suggest we use FreeBSD's style[2] for this. At this point, after we have
> set a standard in quality in our current code base, we need core to
> review any new incoming projects to make sure it is up-to-par with our
> quality.

Again, good idea in principle but this would be a great deal of work not
to actually do the work/review, etc but to convince and pursue people to
get this done.  I think a better way to go about things is to have people
work as Quality-Standards folk and have them submit patches.  This would
help convince developers to at a minimum look into their code and to react
to the submitted patches.
 
> The process would basically be:
>   1) Comment all code
>   2) Adopt a universal style (assure quality, our code needs audits)
>   3) Execute mentorship program, begin assigning mentors to new
>      developers
>   4) We start having monthly IRC seminars covering various topics.
>      This should be related to i18n...or not. We should be a cornerstone
>      for Arab open-source developers.

I believe alot of this will come through your ideas on OAO.  I know we've
talked a bit about IRC seminars and to be honest I look forward to those.

With time and more active developers we hope to address the above 2 points;
with better education, clearer emphasis, better guidelines and improved
samples we can move closer to what you're noting in this thread.  We also
need to increase our productivity and get more development going.

Let's get OpenArabia.org up-n-running so that we can finally realize our
long sought dream - an "Arabic Open Source Portal".  I hope others will
lend their support and assistance in this pursuit.

[1] http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/core/2005/May/msg00012.html

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
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