[Foundation-l] Re: Rewards for developers

Sun Jul 25 01:51:19 UTC 2004

Dori wrote:

> It seems too convoluted and prone to conflicts to work effectively
> IMO. Donors are unlikely to identify all the features/bugs needing
> work.

Aw, come on now. That's not really a problem. We can certainly give 
Jimbo and/or the Board of Trustees the additional power to assign up to 
25% of unassigned donated money to development task.

The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or 
bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers 
by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or 
feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be.

> Likewise, we're unlikely to reach an agreement to the
> percentages.

I think you didn't understand this part. There is no agreement or 
consensus required. Everyone specifies percentages of their own (in some 
sort of designated user interface; they're kept secret). At the end of 
the month, they are averaged out.

Example:
* I say: Alice has done 5% of feature X, Bob has done 10%, Charlie has 
done 85%.
* You say: Alice has done 15% of feature X, Bob has done 15%, Charlie 
has done 70%.
* Jimbo says: Alice has done 10% of feature X, Bob has done 26%, Charlie 
has done 64%.

Then the end-result will be: Alice - 10%, Bob - 17%, Charlie - 73%.

Of course, the averaging could optionally be weighted by the amount of 
money the voters received in the previous month.

> It might also lead to races between developers who start
> stepping on each other's work in order to get more money.

I don't think that will be a problem. Such blatantly un-co-operative 
people can easily be penalised with very low percentages. People will 
know they will get more money if they use their common sense to behave 
within proper forms of etiquette.

Timwi