On 7/20/13 10:47 AM, Hector Santos wrote:
I was somewhat hoping to see more done in the mentor area of assisting electronic participants. Of coarse, this sort of electronic mentoring it could include an end goal to get folks more involved with the IETF directly, i.e. go to meetings, become leaders, etc, but overall assist with protocol standards development.
I think this would be a fabulous addition to the program. As Brian said, the mentoring program is just getting started, so a "meeting mentor" seems like a good starting point, but I have had many experiences with new electronic participants (be it remote meeting participants or simply active mailing list contributors) for whom a mentor would be a great thing. That said, one caveat:
As I have been advised by some IETF vets, I'm sure it will help with the process of getting others more comfortable with you and your work, but is it really absolutely necessary to attend IETF meetings to get an I-D moved thru the process?
It's certainly not necessary to attend face-to-face to get work done, but it sure does help develop a rapport with people. We are all humans, and electronic communications (especially elusively using email) are not ideal for getting our points across or convincing others without some face-to-face interaction. I know of several folks in the community that come across terribly in email and, if you didn't know them offline, understand their communication style, and know where to look in their email messages for the technical content, you'd have a terrible time getting them to be part of a consensus process. And that's the reason for the caveat I mentioned above: One of the big values of a mentoring program is that it allows the mentor to discover the mentee's communication style, help them interact (in person and electronically) with some of our more interesting characters with their interesting communication styles, and help the mentee figure out how to get technical points across effectively. Having a mentor for someone who they will not meet face-to-face makes that part of the metor-mentee relationship much harder to develop.
Even so, I definitely think that the expansion of the program you suggest is a great idea. Figuring out the logistics to make it effective will be tricky (maybe finding a mentor who is geographically close enough to the mentee to make a face-to-face meeting between them possible), but either way I think it is well worth doing.
pr -- Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/> Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478