[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: [EDP] Mentors Council or Coaching Squad?

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bjorn,

I'm not sure this a totally clear/accurate summary of the meeting. ;-)   
I would like to add to this comment, for the public record, that you do 
your job exceedingly well in a tough situation and that we would be 
nowhere without you helping to keep things focused and on track.

I think a lot of us expressed the feeling that we were already mentoring 
new projects in our role as PMC leads/members and that the need for a 
new set of specialized mentors seemed to be trying to fix a problem with 
the existing mentors that could perhaps be addressed by ensuring that 
the current PMC members are performing their role properly.  I'm pretty 
sure we were all agreed that mentoring is one of the things we are 
already responsible for doing well...

Personally I really would like to see the Architecture Council spend 
more time really talking about architecture but I that's proved 
difficult; often we are spending more time on project management, with 
this mentoring issue being a good example of that.  It is a tough 
problem, since much of the architecture discussion happens separately in 
each project, and it's next to impossible to force anyone to do anything 
they don't feel like doing...


Bjorn Freeman-Benson wrote:
> When talking to Jeff McAffer today, he expressed surprise at this:
>
> >  Bjorn Freeman-Benson said:
> >  on behalf of the Architecture Council:
> >  At the October 2006 Architecture Council meeting in Esslingen
> >  (http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/20061012ACMinutes.php),
> >  the Architecture Council rejected the idea of becoming
> >  responsible for mentoring new projects. 
>
> because he saw this as the perfect role for the Architecture Council - 
> what better way to ensure the architectural coherence of Eclipse as a 
> whole than to ensure the cooperation of the disparate projects?