Jorg Heymans wrote:
Hi Mark,
Mark Leicester wrote:
I've been thinking about incentives for community members. The main
community incentive - beyond sharing the fruits of our labour - is
committership. That goal is a long way off for a newbie. I have
wondering about the possibility of setting other targets in between -
particularly in relation to documentation.
I'm interested in hearing why you think that committership is *the* incentive for people to contribute?
I find it plain wrong to dangle a committer-carrot in front of people to
get them contributing. It attracts the wrong type of people and will
hurt the community in the long term.
That's true. Within a meritocratic system, people obtain a nomination because they deserve it, not because they want it. And expressing some desire for a nomination lowers their chances to obtain it.
But I see Mark's aims with the hall of fame more as a measurement tool for community participation than a way for people to show off. And in that way it can be considered to be a valuable resource. The problem however is that the raw number of posts says nothing about their quality, starting by not being able to distinguish questions and answers. The "rounds of applause" as I understand it is a way for people to express their gratefulness to people that helped them.
Problem is that distributing rounds of applause is a voluntary thing and as such can be biased either by donators forgetting to give points to people that would deserve it, or by recipients doing some marketing to have more points (e.g. "... and don't forget to give me points!").
The Cocoon community is probably special in that great care is taken to avoid personal ego show off, even if this doesn't mean that people don't have a big ego, not that they don't like to have recognition :-) But setting up tools that allow people to be more proactive in getting this recognition has the potential to be damageable, as some will monitor their ranking and participate according to what's needed to improve it.
So we need other kinds of indirect measurements. Some of them are in Stefano's agora, such as the variety of people one talks to, which shows some level of community implication.
Well, not easy...
Ah, and I agree with Vadim: change the favicon :-)
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
