On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 18:35 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
That's the problem that setting up a competitive "top ten" type measurement introduces, and it's important at least to understand that. There's always the possibility that the one person who fixes a kernel panic issue is also going to be demotivated by their contribution being recognized in one of those "top ten" lists because they only fixed the one bug, while others fixed 10 or 20 bugs in the same time period - it's important to recognize that not all bugs are equal.
This perfectly sums up why I really, truly, dislike the regular "Top Ten Contributors" list I see with every openSUSE Team @ SUSE Team Blog We want to, and should, recognise our packagers and we do value their contributions, but not all package updates are equal. A simple count of the number of packages changed does not reflect the impact those contributions make to the project. I'm speaking from experience; the few times my name has appeared on that Top Ten list has always been the result of regular, run-of-the-mill GNOME package maintenance - lots of packages getting pretty straight forward updates from it's upstream project. In terms of 'time and effort', despite the large number of packages, my total work in those cases has often been quite low - I'm often just confirming a review by at least one other person in the GNOME team, and the majority of the updates are straight forward incremental changes from Upstream. In a word, it's boring, simple, stuff. Stuff that needs to be done, yes, but worthy of my name reaching a 'Top Ten' list? I think not. Where as my actual contributions that have fixed big issues affecting our users, those kind of fixes that require lots of thought, effort, and time, normally end up folded up into small, single package updates (at least they should, if I'm doing things as efficiently as possible), which totally get missed by the Sum of Packages 'Top Ten' approach. With all that said, I don't feel that I'm 'missing out' by not being recognised for any single changes that have a big impact. I'm not contributing to openSUSE for praise/reward/fame or fortune, but mostly to fix the issues that affect me when I use openSUSE, to 'scratch my own itches', the classical Open Source motivation. Karmafication/Gamification is probably more meaningful/useful for capturing new individuals who might not share that self-sustaining motivation and keeping them involved until (hopefully) it becomes meaningless to them also. Problem is, any system of counting contributions is useless for that goal; It's probably a fair assumption to say new people won't contribute large amounts of stuff, as they probably wont know how. Not even a magical automated measure of 'contribution value' is going to be much help, as the chances are that new contributors are going to go for 'low hanging fruit'. But those are the contributions we need to focus on, it those new people are the ones who probably do need the ego boost of Gamification to keep them interested in the Project initially. But I don't have many answers on how we could change things to really make that idea work..this email has been one of those which has been written as I thought, so doesn't have a nice tidy conclusion.. Thanks for reading :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org