Formalize Mentoring Shadow Program

[caniszczyk]

I had coffee with @hh this morning and the idea of operationalizing mentoring/shadowing programs that exist in K8S SIG Docs and other areas came up. We think this would be something great for the Mentoring WG to own and hopefully launch at kubecon NA.

cc: @hh @nate-double-u

[nate-double-u]

This seems related to this conversation over in contributor strategy: cncf/tag-contributor-strategy#393

[nate-double-u]

I’ve had a bit of time t wonder about this so now i’m circling back 🙂

When you were chatting, who did you have in mind as the audience for the shadow program? Currently there is a lot of time pressure on Maintainers, so we’ve relaxed our “Maintainers must be mentors” stance, and now allow contributors to be the primary mentor on a project, as long as a Maintainer has approved the project. This term, I think 42/63 projects have 2 or more mentors (and I remember last semester being similar). Rather than a formalized shadow program, I wonder if it would be better to direct our efforts at helping these maintainers & contributors write better proposals and know how to select the best candidates.

[nate-double-u]

Removing my assignment--happy to continue to discuss, but this feels stale now. Is this still a direction we'd like to go?