Thinking about the accountability question, I think there’s more to it than making a time commitment but about demonstrating that the fellowship is achieving something of value for both the fellow and the community. If part of the aim of this program is to grow skills and expand our pool of experienced contributors, then we’re likely talking about setting specific professional development objectives and then working towards them.
@mozzy, your idea about jira tickets is a good starting point. If we take the skills and expectations that @burke and others laid out for our Developer Stages, I’m imagining a /dev/3 who can already create a set of tickets to accomplish a specific project and knows that she needs to be able to create epics and organize tickets in order to advance to /dev/4 by the end of the fellowship. If she knows what she needs to do, then it’s a lot easier to look for opportunities to organize tickets and create epics. The /dev/ expectations become objectives to shoot for.
Back to accountability, @janflowers shared some mentorship tools with me a little while ago. Among them is an example of an individual mentoring plan for laying out short and long term goals. It looks like it’s meant to help mentees link their career objectives >>> specific activities >>> projects >>> artifacts.
Other ideas? How can we make this easier?