Plans for 2015: Mentorship and Assessment

That plan ties back to our new bylaws. Broadly speaking, the people who run a non-profit can be either active or passive, i.e., they can either do the work needed to actually run the operation, or check in once in a while to make sure it's being run properly. Most open source foundations' boards are activist, and ours will be too. People who are elected to the Steering Committee will be expected to volunteer 2-3 hours a week to take charge of specific things, and two of those things to be overseeing mentorship and running assessment. In particular, one Steering Committee member will be asked to organize a half-hour call each week in which recent and upcoming instructors can talk about what's working (or isn't) in our lessons, while another will keep the post-workshop assessment questionnaire up to date, analyze the data we collect from it, and poke instructors to make sure they actually fill it in.

Doing this isn't a small commitment, but we're no longer a small organization. A dozen people are already serving as maintainers for specific topics, and I hope that formalizing our governance will make it easier for others to play a larger role as well.