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