On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 15:10 +0200, david blanchard wrote:

> "1) Find the people who bring ideas more often than opinions.
> 2) Find the people who are doing more than saying.
> 
> This made me think that we'd need to find good ways to identify both
> factors for our status/credits criterias, and for the ranking of
> contributors of the homepage. What do you think?

We do - but it's tricky ;p

To keep things simple at the beginning, we could simply give more weight
to contributions to tools like the brainstorm/UserVoice (for ideas) or
launchpad/task tracker than posts on the forum and mailing list. Then we
keep these rules in mind, and progressively adapt the scoring to make
sure these remains the main criterias.

> Usually, in open source projects, is there a quantitative appraisal of
> the work of contributors, based on number and importance of
> contributions, quality of work, etc?

It depends on the project - there are advantages to quantitative
measures, but also drawbacks (it pushes people to "game" the system, and
when it's not done right it tends to outweight the benefits).

Launchpad/Ubuntu, for example, is using this; we even already have it
for the part of the work that we do on Launchpad!
https://launchpad.net/hackit/+topcontributors 

> For instance, for the passage from ‘active contributor’ to ‘occasional
> contractor’, it would be interesting to have something based on
> quantitative stuff. 
> But I’m not sure it’s possible, for instance if we have tasks that
> require very specific skill that cannot be found in the active
> contributor and we need to hire a contractor specifically for that,
> even if he does not meet a list of quantitative criteria.

I think we can start slow with this - first try to have some
quantitative measures, and then progressively try to tie it to roles.
We're going to need a lot of experimentation here - and at first we
won't need it to know who should be credited where, so the automation
can be progressive.

> Do you have links with examples of the ways contributors are appraised
> by their peers in open source projects ? 

It's usually a bit of public acknowledgment, some formalities (names in
source code, credits...), reviews of concrete work (code reviews), the
comments in the public discussions, and a lot of implicit recognition.

Nothing prevents us to use it as a base, and go a bit further by also
implementing a more formal appraisal process, especially for
employees/contractors and those who volonteer to get it. Jono Bacon,
Ubuntu's community manager, says he does it for himself sometimes.

Xavier.


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