* Jos Poortvliet <jos@opensuse.org> [2014-01-15 10:48]:
Exactly. In every Free Software project, credit where it is due (and the respect of your peers) plays a huge role. So does seeing the impact of what you do. While there are many different reasons why people contribute, these two are shared by at least a majority of our contributors.
That is what this is about: making visible what impact your work has (eg show the number of users of packages on OBS) and allowing others to see what you do (eg show packages you maintain on your profile).
From there on, we can do more elaborate things with this information, like calculate an activity metric or make a top-ten of bugfixers. Or not. That is something we can decide in a later stage, and even experiment with and get rid off if it doesn't work.
Except that it doesn't work at all because you cannot accurately quantify the quality of contributions in an automated fashion with the available information as it has been pointed out several times in this thread. Whether a package is in high demand does not say anything about its quality. The number of changelog entries someone has added to a specfile (i.e. how we measure Factory contributions) does not say anything about the value of these changes (e.g I can come up with a script that goes over all specfiles in Factory, corrects the capitalization of the Summary and automatically srs them in 5 minutes and next month I'm the top contributor whereas soemone spending a couple of hours on fixing a handful of core packages remains invisible). Dealing with badly written bugreports which in the end turn out to be invalid (e.g. due to the problem bein in an unsupported binary driver) can take hours and much patience and would be a thankless effort, whereas fixing a simple typo in the specfile in five minutes resulting in a fixed bugreport gives you a reward. I could go on and on.
Also, please realize that motivation differs between people. Some do find a top-ten kind'a cool, others don't. The fact that you might not does not mean it does have no value for others. For a short spell AJ and myself put weekly contributor stats to Factory on news.o.o and we heard back from several people that they found it cool to get in there. I'm not saying it makes a huge difference, but why not recognize and motivate those who do appreciate this?
Because it is flawed and inevitably sets the wrong incentives for those receptive to this gamification stuff. -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org