Ubuntu mentors

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 11:55:42AM +0800, Senectus . wrote:
[...]
> Where "experts" can list their particular skills and area's of
> knowledge and in turn get rated on their accuracy of reply and
> timeliness.. :-)

Mentoring should not involve ratings - that leads to bad things. As I
stated in my comment on the Newsforge letter, Ubuntu already has active
avenues for a mentor/mentored exchange; there're IRC, the forum(s), the
mailing lists. What we need to do is cull all these resources into a
Web-friendly environment akin to Gmane where users can just post their
questions, and we'll all pipe in with our responses. Come to think on
it, we nearly have this currently - the forum is "gatewayed" into the
mailing list.

One critical reason against rating "experts" is that mentors don't
explicitly have "expert" knowledge in their area. Many software
companies have excellent mentoring programs, and the mentors that are
involved in such programs aren't "experts" but simply people who kindly
invest time in their mentored. I've had mentors who simply asked other
employees to fill them in regarding details. This approach is fairly
similar to what we all do on IRC, particularly when it comes to MOTU.
#ubuntu-motu relies heavily on #ubuntu-devel for mentorship although
the former is involved more directly with mentoring new Ubuntu users
who wish to become more involved with the universe and multiverse
packages.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel T. Chen            crimsun at ubuntu.com
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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