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From: Jukka Zitting <jukka.zitting@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2012 10:17:45 +0100
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Subject: Re: Anticipating my reign of terror -- new idea for December
To: general <general@incubator.apache.org>
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Hi,

On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 11:29 PM, Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com> wrote:
> At the bottom of the template for each podling's report, I'd like to have a
> space for each of the mentors, every month, to reaffirm his or her
> involvement in the podling. Thus, instead of (at most) one mentor signing
> off on the report, itself, we'd get a reading on how many mentors are in
> the game. If the number were less than 3 -- and -- especially, if it were
> less than one, we'd be alerted and could make it a priority to find
> replacements.

That last bit may be a bit troublesome.

I did something similar earlier in the summer when I identified a
number of inactive mentors. Back then the only followup I could come
up with was to update the Incubator records and to ask for volunteers
to step in. Unfortunately it has been quite difficult to get people to
commit themselves to mentoring a project that may already be in a bit
of a trouble (existing mentors often start to loose interest when
incubation time grows).

Coming up with the shepherd model has been my attempt to answer that
problem. If we can't find enough active mentors for a podling, then at
least the IPMC should be able to collectively provide some level of
help and feedback to keep a podling moving forward (or to gracefully
shut it down).

So you're right when you say that the shepherd model was created to
compensate for a problem and ideally shouldn't be needed. However, the
problem here isn't identifying inactive mentors (as seen earlier, we
already have everything we need for that) but rather how to replace
them. So far, apart from the shepherd model, we haven't seen too many
ideas on how to solve or at least partially address that problem.

BR,

Jukka Zitting

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