Reviving the idea of Fedora Mentors?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do you need to track that?


Why does any volunteer organization want to keep track of the amount
of time individuals are committing and what things they are doing?  We
want to make sure we are putting human resources into the overall
project in a way that we aren't creating bottlenecks, or worse in a
way that is wasteful.  The most critically important resource we have
is available volunteer time and goodwill, and we need to start looking
seriously at how well we are managing those resources as they come
into the door.  We need to make sure that when we encourage people to
participate we are doing it a way that we are asking people to spend
time in a way that makes a positive impact. And we need to find ways
to measure that impact.  If we think mentoring is a good idea, then we
need to try to measure that impact. But we cant really gauge impact
unless we have a reasonable estimate of the manhours going in. More
important for me we need to try to make a long term effort to trend
the impact of different areas of 'contribution' that we stand up.
Unless we attempt to track manhours spent in different areas how do we
ever really get a handle on whether we need to push one area over
another through a project wide recruitment program?   Different parts
of the project are going to grow organically on their own...but not
necessarily at the same rate. As one bit grows it can create growing
pains for other groups, and its exactly this sort of imbalance that we
need to watch out for and respond to via recruitment drives.

-jef