The Apprentice Queue would be a place for Padawans to express what they like to contribute to Drupal and so define a personal learning path. After an inquiry between potential mentors (Jedi masters) and the Padawan, a mentor may assign her/him-selves to the issue, thereby indicating mentoring is happening. After the assignment we expect mentor and Padawan to find their own proper form of communication.
Basically this could be a "quick win" as many of the functionalities already exist with the issue queue. We should redefine the terms a bit, the issue queue is currently not so useful to mediate people. Do we run into trouble if we try to do this?
I would suggest having a setup of the Apprentice Queue in the sandbox to figure out what works and what doesn't. If this seems a good approach, give me some time to make a demo. If you like to help out creating the demo, let me know. If you see issues with this approach, please discuss them here so we don't spend time creating functionalities that won't get implemented anyway.
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hope i understand this...
We also have the "novice" tag, as you may have known. How would we get project owners to identify what is suitable for an apprentice? Or is this to be done outside a mentor? Is this only for core, or also contrib?
Have you seen the Views Bug Squad?
http://drupal.org/node/945414
The great thing they do is bring in the apprentices to do triage. This is an important skill which can be done by a novice. It also provides the "legitimate peripheral participation" required for gaining this kind of step into the community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation
Identifying such tasks isn't so easy however.
There is a tag for "issues needing triage"... but that is just core.
Is this the kind of thing you mean? Or something more specific?
It would mainly be contib
The idea is to hava a queue, but not for issues, for people. Your mentioning great task that people can work on, but they are still issues.
You could see the Apprentice Queue as the direct relationship, like with GSOC. It is considered a focus on contib. mentoring, while core has Core office hours (http://drupal.org/node/1242856).
So instead of issues you have user that express their interest in learning something, another user can assign her/him-self to the user, thus becoming the mentor.
The effect of properly mentoring a Padawan should get visibility in the user profile.
It will be a lot easer when I created a demo, but I will need some time to figure it out and create the demo.
ah! a context for mentoring.
OOOOO!!! I get it!! I get it!!
Did you see this?
http://groups.drupal.org/contributed-module-ideas
I saw this sad post about a new Drupal developer completely turned off by a bad experience:
http://patrickavella.com/blog/certified-rock-and-cult-drupal
It looks like your idea could help prevent that kind of situation!
cool
I had a quick look at the group, but need to look more too it. There may be several things discussed in the group that we need to consider in our demo attempts.
[ Should focus on my work now, so I'll not be responding for the next 6 hours, it will be PhD by day and Padawan by night for me ... sounds familiar ;-) ]
Also saw the docs group
Also saw the docs group seriously needs to mentor.. http://groups.drupal.org/node/171404
this could provide context for that, and make it easier for people to mentor others in making the new documentation.