[Gnumed-devel] Fwd: Happy birthday Debian Med any announcement of MOM

[Sebastian Hilbert]

FYI. 

Please see the message below. If anyone lurking here feels like helping out by 
learning how to package and update software for Debian/Ubuntu please feel free 
to contact the folks of Debian-med.

Regards,
Sebastian Hilbert

Best regards
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Happy birthday Debian Med any announcement of MOM
Date: Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:47:44 AM
From: Andreas Tille <address@hidden>
To: Debian Med Project List <address@hidden>

Hi,

I'm happy to announce that the Debian Med project now has passed its
10th birthday which according to [0] should be considered

   Mon, 7 Jan 2002

We are now in need of a master of ceremony who makes sure we will not
forget this date next time.  While we missed the date somehow I propose
to do a small celebration at the Debian Med sprint at end of January
in Southport[1].

I would like to say thanks to everybody who helped the project
developing from a single person with a crazy idea who started by picking
up some orphaned biomedical packages to a strong team maintaining a set
of over 200 highly specialised packages with a high quality standard.
Many thanks - ten years ago I did not imagine that we could reach that a
strong state!

To ensure that this development of a strong team will continue I would
like to propose a new effort I would like to call

              "Mentoring Of the Month"  (MOM)

In this program I would like to dedicate a part of my spare time to a
newcomer (the "student") providing any packaging knowledge I have to
enable him working more or less independently on packaging after passing
this MOM period.  I like to guide the student kindly into all secrets of
Debian packaging at the example of a specific program which is in the
focus of the Debian Med team.  The student is free to pick the package
however, I would like to have a vetoing right in case I see the package
in some way as "unfit for the MOM project" (too complicated, too
non-free, too far away from Debian Med topic, too whatever).  At the end
of the month the goal is that

   a) The package in question is finished and uploaded
   b) The student is able to do advanced packaging tasks and is
      introduced into the communication channels of Debian Med
      team

The communication about this should be tagged with "[MOM]" in the
subject line of the exchanged mails to enable others who might not be
interested to procmail it out of their focus and enables other potential
students to learn from this.

In this MOM process I would like to apply some strict rules:

  1. If I'm posting something on the list containing [MOM] in the
     subject the student tries hard to respond with any comment (if not
     better possible something like:  I have no idea but I will do some
     research like asking upstream or whatever - just leaving a hint
     that he feels responsible somehow).
  2. The student tries to follow any of my commits to the package which
     is in focus of the MOM plan and favourably sends a comment like
      - Its OK for me
      - What does this mean, please explain
      - I would prefer ... instead of your change
     To get informed about the changes the student needs to be
     subscribed to the commit mailing list[2] or at least do regular
     "svn up; svn log"
     He just tries to find a useful comment to any commit just to make
     sure he has understood things and will be able to do it himself
     in the future.
  3. The student confirms that he succeeded in building the package
     according to the state in SVN in case it builds or he is able to
     reproduce the error message of the build process.
  4. If there is any problem the student will ask on the Debian Med
     mailing list (tagging the subject [MOM] to not spam others to much.)
     This list should be the main communication channel to show others:
      a) we are working on a problem
      b) how things could be sorted out via open discussion
      c) how they could learn things about packaging
     We can also communicate via #debian-med IRC channel, however
     the time I have access to the evening hours (MET).
  5. The student post a status report about the packaging every day
     reporting about changes he did, issues he faced or discussions
     he did with upstream etc.

Please be careful.  The MOM plan is *work*.  While I would like you to
show that work can be fun I expect the student to do some work in the
same way as I offer to spend my spare time to do the other part of the
work which needs to be done.  So I will ask the student whether he did
his part of the work if I have done mine.  If not I will stop the work
on this package and will continue with another MOM student and his
package (in case there might be a waiting list).

My hope in MOM is that we will be able to train those silent observers
of the list to become more vocal.  This training not only provides
technical knowledge.  I learned that this is only 50% of the job.  The
other part is communication which is heavily underestimated.  I do not
mean plain chatting - I mean communication which leads straight to a
technical implementation.

I'm really keen on seeing whether some students might raise their hand
to take part in the MOM project.

Kind regards 

        Andreas.

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/01/msg00454.html
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012
[2] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-med-commit
[3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-commit/

-- 
http://fam-tille.de


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