On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 17:58:38 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
People tend to be competitive. Turn it into a game.
Those making requests should be given a certain number of "points" per
day that they're allowed to assign to their requests (or to already
existing requests). When a developer completes a task, they're
awarded all the points for that task.
Then you need a scoreboard that shows which developers are "winning".
Open-source is 20 years old. There are thousands of open-source
projects. Some are successful, most are not. The development of
open-source projects is on public record. There are mailing list
archives, project web sites, history of CVS commits.
We don't have to guess or invent new ways of making open-source
projects succesful. Much safer strategy is to analyze past, which is
rich with examples, and identify processes that lead to success. Those
who forget the past...
I've followed my share of open-source projects. Big and small,
succesful and failed.
I've never seen "rewarding with points" system applied in practice.
Therefore it's unlikely that it's a good idea and it's certainly very
risky to try things no-one has tried before.
I've seen attempts to apply "bounty" systems to open-source (sorry for
lack of reference, I forgot the names of the projects). They all
failed (as in: didn't produce a lot of new, good code).
I don't know a single succesful open-source project that implements
bounty system. Even less one that can claim that its success is caused
by bounty system.
I've seen projects that flourish despite not having any external
rewards systems in place (mono is a recent example, but there are of
course plenty of them: GNOME and KDE projects, subversion, eclipse,
gcc and I would consider wikimedia to be quite successful so far as it
works well enough to support a massive undertaking as WikiPedia).
It's safe to conclude that you don't need bounty system to have
succesful project.
The real question is: what is?
I think the discussion "is bounty system good or bad" is premature,
stems from a haphzard idea of an individual (as opposed to systematic
exploration of possible options to improve mediawiki project).
It diverts attention from much more important question: "what are the
ways to improve mediawiki".
Krzysztof Kowalczyk |
http://blog.kowalczyk.info