Re: on "meritocracy"

2019-03-23 Thread Ross Gardler
No additional comment from me on the word choice. I do agree meritocracy is 
problematic given increasingly popular views on the model in other places - 
I've always been careful to warn that the difference between a meritocracy and 
a oligarchy is minimal. Which brings me to the recognition of merit.

I am never a fan of tools to solve a social problems. Tools do not bring 
visibility, they bring an opportunity to play the system. People shoulf take 
responsibility and actively demonstrate the way things should work. See a merit 
deserving action - call it out with a thank you. If you have the patience I'll 
illustrate this with a story, but feel free to stop reading now as I've made my 
point about tooling being potentially damaging.

Years ago I was brought into a client to help them understand why things were 
failing for them with respect to customer satisfaction. They were hitting all 
their support metrics, such as mean time to resolution, but their CSAT scores 
remained low. Their engineering teams were becoming worried that despite a 
genuine focus on customer needs they seemed to be building something people 
didn't like.

I was brought in as a consultant. I ignored the data they handed to me on day 
one. It came from the tools. I already knew that data was wrong since it told 
me they were meeting targets and their targets were good ones. I started 
talking to people about what they did to contribute to improving CSAT. I 
quickly found that engineering had a good process for prioritizing work that 
support tooling highlighted as problem areas. I found marketing were accurately 
representing current and future features. The sales teams were not over selling 
the product features. Support were picking up tickets and triaging them 
according to their best practice. I was baffled.

So I went to the tools, despite my lack of trust in their data. I started with 
the customer support cases. It looked like every other data set I'd seen 
before. A few tickets took a long time to resolve but they had good attention 
from product, engineering and support, while most tickets were resolved fairly 
quickly. I ran queries on the raw data, rather than relying on the roll-up 
queries the tool provided. That's when I saw it. There was one particular team 
(they worked on 3 x 8 shifts around the globe) who was killing it with respect 
to closing tickets in a timely way, and the team that followed was struggling. 
From the roll up data it looked like the second team struggled with hard 
tickets, though their performance on easier tickets was comparable. When I 
queried on these hard tickets alone I realized they had a tendency to re-open 
previously resolved tickets - and they were almost always hard ones.

I asked the support lead about these two teams. She told me that she had never 
managed to get the poorer team to really step up, there was no strong leader 
and while he and his team did good work, he just couldn't seem to hold his team 
together, new hires quickly quit or moved out of the support role. The better 
team was full of rockstars. She wasn't worried about hiring there because the 
manager just seemed to have a talent for finding the best. Her bigger worry 
there was having capacity to promote those people.

So I dug deeper. What I found was that the "better" team was led by a manager 
who played the system. He taught his team, for example, to close tickets as 
duplicates of newer tickets, even if they weren't related. The tool reported 
their resolution numbers as healthy, but they weren't really working with the 
customer. The team that followed picked up the newer tickets, recognized the 
"mistake", reopened the original and resolved both. The tool reported their 
numbers as poorer, but in reality they were doing way more work.

This is why the manager there couldn't hold his staff. They were fed up of 
correcting the bad work of others. As soon as they realized the others were 
getting promotions and their team was not they left.

The tools hid the truth. Only talking to people can truly recognize 
contribution. It is the responsibility of the people in the community to 
cultivate and recognize merit. In my opinion the best way to do this is to have 
the lowest possible bar. Having an artificially high bar is the real problem 
for lack of recognition. With a low bar one only needs to see a relatively low 
amount of contribution.

[If you are interested in the outcome of the above story... I asked the 
"struggling" manager why he didn't tell the lead what was happening. I never 
got a good answer. The outcome was that the lead fired the questionable 
manager, helped the other manager understand that she always needed to know 
when the process is broken and promoted him. She also put them in charge of 
training and process refinement across all three sites. Six months later they 
could see a very marked difference in their Customer Sat scores.]


From: 

wiki.apache.org/general status (going away in May!)

2019-03-23 Thread Shane Curcuru
Infra is decommissioning the MoinMoin wiki software that runs the
wiki.a.o system in May.  That means all the content there needs to be
migrated to new systems if it's still relevant.

Infra has a Moin - Confluence wiki migration tool that can help port a
whole section of wiki over to the new supported system, if projects need
to do so.

Question: Who's working on the old 'general' wiki?  Much of it is
outdated, but there may still be some useful content.  Any volunteers to
look through it to see what should be saved, probably either to the
ComDev website or our newer Wiki?

  https://wiki.apache.org/general/ (being deleted 31-May)

  https://community.apache.org/about/#getcode
  https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/ComDev+Wiki

-- 

- Shane
  ComDev PMC (but currently overextended...)
  The Apache Software Foundation

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Re: on "meritocracy"

2019-03-23 Thread Griselda Cuevas
Hi Everyone, I read this thread and got a few comments according to how
well I was able to track all statements and arguments. English is not my
first language and it was hard for me to keep track of the current state of
this discussion. Complicated words and sentence structure were used to
state points by authors here, to the point I was almost giving up
commenting.

In any case, as Naomi stated, I don't want to muddy the waters, just wanted
to exemplify why we often hear from specific people in certain mailing
lists/projects, making it hard for us to truly follow a meritocracy model.

I extracted 2 main convos

1) Choose a better term to use instead of meritocracy.

2) improve the way Apache projects and the foundation recognize project
collaboration.

For 1) I personally think the word meritocracy isn't the problem. If you
translate it to Spanish, the word is fair and adecuate to describe the
governance model the foundation follows. I believe the problem is that the
concept of merit awarding is broken and often related to Bias from the
group assigning the merit. This said, according to the article, I
understand that the problem is that the core group of an organization
awarding contributions would be Bias and therefore will perpetuate unfair
development. My conclusion is that, the word isn't the problem, the problem
is in the system.

This being said, I have no preference in wether we should change it or not.
Since Rich, Bertrand and others are putting efforts into defining better
the language, I support that with no opossition.

2) From my personal experience supporting projects under the Apache model,
I can say that the difficulty in assigning fair and unbiased merit to
people in the community comes from lack of process and tools. For example,
in Apache Beam, we've been working on several advocacy effort which have
helped the project's brand grow, and surface areas of improvement for the
tech. However, the PMC committee doesn't have full visibility in how much
effort comes from each individual, since only one representative sits with
us during planning meetings. On the other hand, when I talk to other PMC
members about possible new committers, I hear names of people I don't know
because I don't interact with their part of the project, making me think
that it's unfair others get recognized over people organizing Summits or
community efforts.

We are in the middle of defining a better process to bring visibility of
efforts to everyone in the project and make the committership process more
fair and transparent.

This aligns with the efforts Sally recently posted on non-code contribution
recognition and I think solving this should support Naomi's original
statement: meritocracy will beging to "work" and diversity will start to
flourish.

Happy to help build better practices and processes to make fair recognition
and diversity win.


Re: on "meritocracy"

2019-03-23 Thread Naomi Slater
the Apache Software Foundation was started in 1999. that makes it 20 years
old. in 2016, our committer survey indicated that women make up 5.2% of our
committer base. Black people make up 0.1% (one single person who responded
to the survey)

I think it's about time to admit defeat and try something else

if we want to strive for an inclusive, equitable organization, the
literature (see the first article I linked to) tells us that embracing
"meritocracy" as a core value works against that goal

On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 at 01:46, Dinesh Joshi 
wrote:

> Striving for an ideal is good. Doing away with it entirely feels like
> giving up on it and admitting defeat.
>
> Dinesh
>
> > On Mar 22, 2019, at 4:24 PM, Naomi Slater  wrote:
> >
> > I suspect the answer is not to replace the word but to do away with it
> > entirely
> >
> >> On Fri 22. Mar 2019 at 21:28, Roman Shaposhnik 
> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 9:59 AM Rich Bowen  wrote:
>  On 3/22/19 3:03 AM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
>  It would be very important to come up with a replacement that is
>  as effective as what we're trying to replace. Frankly, I don't know
>  a single candidate.
> >>>
> >>> As discussed elsewhere in the thread, simply coming up with a new word,
> >>> while potentially helpful in starting conversations, doesn't really
> >>> address the underlying problem. And each new word (do-ocracy is one
> that
> >>> has been proposed, for example) comes with its own set of concerns and
> >>> baggage.
> >>
> >> FWIW: the only word I can 100% embrace as a wholesale replacement
> >> of meritocracy is do-ocracy.
> >>
> >>> We have had the "what other word can we use" conversation at least once
> >>> on this mailing list, and at least one on members, in the last 2 years.
> >>> Neither conversation resulted in anything actionable.
> >>
> >> That's basically my point.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Roman.
> >>
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> >>
>
>
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Help with task: Ensure all Apache TLPs have Wikipedia pages

2019-03-23 Thread jhon.kong28
I would like to help out with the task listed at 
/task.html?0b349beeส่งจากสมาร์ทโฟน Samsung Galaxy ของฉัน