[Soc-coordination] mentoring programs in Debian

[Ana Guerrero]

[Dropped -vote]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 08:48:33PM +0000, Wolodja Wentland wrote:
>
[...]
> Would you mind elaborating on this? The background to this is that I am
> currently considering mentoring the "Leiningen & Clojure packaging" project
> [0] and your comments make me think twice about commiting to this. I thought
> that the proposal has merit and would allow an interested student to gather
> valuable insights into Debian and its packaging infrastructure or tooling.
> 
> [0] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2013/Projects#Leiningen_.26_Clojure_packaging

I chose not to be involved this year in GSoC so I can not tell you if this
year "packaging proposals" are welcome or not. You need to talk with this
year's admins.

What I can give you are my personal thoughts about why I think this kind
of projects are usually not the best idea to be done inside the GSoC from 
a mentor POV, but rather in a more traditional Debian mentorship approach
in learning how to package and maintain software in Debian.

GSoC is about getting students spending their summer contributing to free
software and not in another kind of jobs (see the motto: "flip bits not
burguers"). In most of the cases, the students don't have previous experience
in free software development. But this is not always the case, of course.
The students get with this program the opportunity to learn about free
software or improve their skills while the mentoring organization is given
the opportunity to recruit new contributors or train contributors in
new areas.
If you happen to have a proposal from a student who has interest in Debian,
most likely a Debian or Debian derivative user already, and has interest in 
Clojure, as in already have some knowledge in how to code in the language
or at least LISP...  Then you will spend your summer training somebody who 
is likely to stuck in the clojure packaging team after the summer, because 
the student benefits of this work. That time you have invested will be worth 
it, even the times it took you more time helping the student that doing the 
task yourself. This is clearly a win-win, and in this case, mentor a project 
like this without hesitation.

In a most likely scenarios, the student only has interest in Debian or Clojure
and while they might stick around Debian after their project is over working
in another area, it's very unlikely. There are plenty of possibilities here
that come to my mind here, but this email would be too long.

If your thoughts are: well, even if the student doesn't stick after the
summer, somebody will have done this stuff I wanted done. Then you're
effectively falling in the case "Debians contributor who want somebody
doing an item of their TODO list". And even worse, you will have invested
in the student almost the time that would have taken you doint it yourself...

So from the mentor perspective, your time is better invested mentoring
people who want to have clojure in Debian because they are both clojure and
Debian users. Those power users in this area who would love start contributing
to Debian. You have a bigger pool of interested people and you don't need to
restrict yourself to mentoring one single person.

>From my point of view, with non-packaging projects this is different, because 
if they get interested and enjoy working in Debian, they can keep contributing 
more or less frequently with code, patches, code reviews, etc. While package 
maintenance puts a burden on the student they are unlikely to be interested after 
(unless they are, as said before, users of this software in first place).

HTH,
Ana