RIP Mentoring Programme

[Connor Imes]

Hi Phil and team,

Phil Bull wrote:
 > As I see it, one of the weaknesses of the mentoring programme has been
> that we try to take students on board before they have any ideas about
> the tasks that they can be expected to work on. Quite a few students
> never even reply to my initial email, so providing a small initial
> hurdle (such as having to choose a task) should discourage those who
> aren't very serious about joining the team. The downside is that I don't
> expect as many people to express an interest in helping out, but the
> ones who do will hopefully be more committed from the outset.
> 
I agree, we tend to get quite a few emails but no followups.  On the
Beginners Team, we have found that it is much easier to retain members
if we get them interacting with other team members right away, primarily
through using IRC.  This medium makes it very easy to ask questions and
get answers quickly, email is just too slow.

> I propose that we advertise tasks of varying difficulties on the wiki
> [1] and allow people to choose one before they get in touch with us. We
> can then collectively guide them through the course of the task,
> providing help on the mailing list/IRC as appropriate.
> 
And vice versa - if people email the list, invite them to IRC and direct
them to the new page at the same time.  If we want to try and reach out
to the community, there are a number of ways to do this as well.
Perhaps a thread/sticky on the forums might spark some interest - there
are a lot of users there, many with specialties.

> When we advertise tasks, we should provide as much background
> information as possible so that new contributors have a good idea of
> what to do from the very beginning. There should be goals/milestones for
> each task so that people have targets to work to and something to focus
> on. I think that a more structured approach like this will help to
> reduce the confusion that some previous students have experienced. Two
> examples are on the wiki [1].
> 
I found that one of the biggest challenges was finding out HOW to do
certain tasks on the wiki.  There are a variety of help pages, but they
are spread out and not always easy to locate.  Having people in IRC
immediately available to answer questions is a big help, if nothing more
than to point them to the correct help page.

> 
> [1] -
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/Tasks
> 

-Connor (Rocket2DMn)