Re: Metaproblem, part 3

[João Távora]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

>  > We can certainly try that, and see if it helps.
>
> You could try it, but in my experience with communities that have
> evident mentoring efforts suggests that "tangential matters or topics
> too advanced" are not that big a problem.  Newcomers generally detect
> and ignore 2/3 or more of those posts.  If newcomers get confused by
> those, they should go off-list.  If mentors detect that a newcomer is
> getting confused, *they* should go off-list.

Yes, going off-list is useful. the [mentoring] tag is useful when the
effort decides to stay on-list, for some reason. IMO the benefit of
going off-list isn't avoiding distraction anyway, it's that intimacy
promotes confidence. 

The remaining things I said apply for both on-list and off-list dialog
anyway. It's those that I am unsure about, so wonder if you'd like to
comment.

> The bigger problem is the level of list traffic itself, which is
> intimidating to newcomers, who often don't even want to subscribe.  If
> there are people who have demonstrated interest in mentoring, a
> separate list is a good idea.

That should work too, but perhaps at a later phase. Right now, the
following can be done with relatively low overhead:

* Announce the mentoring idea to this list and/or to the contribution
  guide (advise newcomers to ask for a mentor on this list before
  posting code or starting a discussion).

* Detail mentor's role with some do's and don'ts. Detail non-mentor's
  role.
  
* Mentoring should be strictly on list and use [mentoring] tags?
  Off-list? Up to them?

To test the process, I can volunteer to submit a couple of reasonably
small ideas, between 100 and 300 LOC, that need a mentor (*). I have
contributed to emacs before, but got lost in the git transition and
recent discussion so I have a lot of doubts, from how to clone the
official repo, ELPA/Emacs decision, etc. The process should obviously be
Stefanless, i.e. someone should volunteer to mentor, otherwise there
will be two orphan "[mentor-request]" emails in the list, which will
also say something of the usefulness of the idea :-)

João

* I also have a bigger idea on yasnippet that is being mentored by
Stefan off-list, but that's too complex for an experiment right now.