tic(a)tictric.net wrote:
Sadly, I don't know much about programming and so
my question may
appear "stupid",
but what sort of contract are you going to make with a "paid volunteer"?
I don't know much about the legal side of things, but since other
organisations have done it before, I'm sure we can learn from them what
needs to be done. In the case of LiveJournal, Sandy Fitzpatrick would be
the one to contact.
What sort of quality can be guaranteed by that sort of
job?
What sort of quality can be guaranteed (or even expected) from a team of
completely unpaid volunteers? With all due respect to the current and
past developers, from a software engineering point of view MediaWiki is
very bad quality the way it is now.
Does one have to prove his abilities before taking on
the job?
Again, does one have to prove his abilities before participating in the
unpaid volunteer effort? Your questions have nothing really to do with a
payment system. You're asking about how volunteer teams work. We already
have a volunteer team.
Will the rewarded developer only be rewarded after
there is no bugs
found anymore? Or at least not for the past two weeks?
I can't speak for other systems that have been proposed, but in the
system I'm envisioning, people would receive less compensation for their
work if the voters feel their work was done with very bad quality and
led to more bugreports being opened.
Also remember that *not all* bugs and features need to be paid for. Only
those that are important but nobody would want to work on them without
payment.
But when you say you pay him like an artist (and some
programmers if
not many are artists indeed) is he responsible for his mistakes? Is it
the job of "unrewarded volunteers" to correct bugs?
You're asking more and more questions about the system as it is already.
This has nothing to do with rewards in the form of payment. We *already*
have volunteers, and we *already* have people who write features and
make mistakes (it's only human). We *already* have to ask ourselves
whose responsibility it is to clean up after them, and we *already* have
the problem that nobody feels truly responsible. The payment system
alleviates this problem by increasing motivation.
If a new feature introduces new bugs, bugreports can be opened in our
bug tracking software. If someone likes to fix them for free, very nice.
If not, a payment for that can be offered too.
Are you going to "reward" writers for badly
needed articles on
wikipedia too later on? Or the ones that try to preserve a certain
level of quality of the articles?
Don't think too far. The payment system for developers is only an
experiment, anyway. Nobody knows if it will work out. If it *does* work
out, there is certainly no reason not to use the same system to reward
work on actual articles -- but let's concentrate on one side of it first.
Timwi