Why Linux needs a mentor program

[Rahul Sundaram]

Patrick Barnes wrote:

>Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hi
>>
>>It was interesting to read your article on
>>http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/13/1816200&tid=35.
>>It was particularly relevant to me since Fedora very recently started
>>a mentoring program[1] to get users and developers to participate and
>>get involved in Fedora is a better way. While its not a entirely new
>>idea or effort its good to see we set ourselves in the right
>>direction. The amount of involvement required to take it to Linux on
>>the whole is enormous.  I believe we already do that in a modular
>>fashion in the form of various help sites like
>>http://linuxquestions.org for users or http://kernelnewbies.org for
>>developers. A central place to list and combine all these efforts
>>might work better rather doing it from scratch
>>
>>regards
>>Rahul
>>
>>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mentors
>>
>>    
>>
>Hmm... The article focuses on mentors for end-user support, while our
>mentors program is geared towards contributors.  Is end-user mentoring
>something we really want to tackle?  Obviously, it would be nice to have
>a full mentoring program for new users, but it is really a question of
>resources.  Our contributor mentoring is only barely getting off the
>ground. 
>
Fedora users list already serves that purpose very well.  We can 
probably invite a few active users in the Fedora-list who are helpful to 
others and sign them up as mentors explicitly as a form of 
acknowledgment.  You are right that we do not want mentors list to turn 
into users list - part 2, atleast not without getting new resources

regards
Rahul