[Foundation-l] Re: Rewards for developers

Sun Jul 25 13:25:03 UTC 2004

Dori wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 02:51:19 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> 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.
> 
> I don't know that we could. It might piss off some donors if we said
> we'll use this for hardware, and we end up using it for software
> features.

We shouldn't be saying we'll be using the money for anything particular. 
That just ties our hands.

> I simply thought that the process had too many rules to be properly
> understood and to work well.

"Too many rules"? Are you saying it's too complicated and you don't 
understand how it's supposed to work? It's not complicated at all; as I 
said, the LiveJournal Bazaar worked similar to this, and developers 
there were perfectly happy with it and understood how it worked.

If you have any specific questions about the system, feel free to ask. 
Please don't dismiss it solely on the grounds that you don't understand 
it; if you have any specific criticism that you think makes the system 
unsuitable, I will happily accept that. Otherwise, I would really like 
to give this a try, at least for a few month until we can definitely say 
that it doesn't work well. I'll do all the necessary coding for the 
voting interface, the averaging, etc.

> Yes, I did misunderstand that. I still don't see it as a fair method
> though. Averages could give some screwey results which might leave
> people who made more work, receive less compensation.

It is perfectly fair. Think about it. Who did "more" or "less" work is 
completely subjective. Everyone has their own perception of what 
percentage of the work was done by certain people. By averaging out the 
percentages, we create some sort of "collective subjective judgment", 
and everybody's own judgment will be part of it.

If you're afraid that people might cheat the system by giving ridiculous 
percentages, this isn't a problem either. Firstly, only people who have 
actually done development in the last month, and the Board of Trustees 
perhaps, have voting power. You won't get much voting power if you're 
not a responsible individual. Hence, when averaging stuff, the 
"irresponsible percentages" will be given much less weight.

Additionally, of course, you shouldn't be able to vote for yourself. :)

>>>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.
> 
> It's not necessarily blatant. It could even be inadvertant, or it
> could be as simple as if I am going to do this part I might as well do
> that part or I would prefer that part to work like I plan it. Coding
> is much harder to do collaboratively than editing (unless we're
> talking about unrelated parts).

A bug or feature should be assigned to a particular developer (this is a 
core feature of BugZilla, which I'm still hoping we will switch to in 
the long run). It will be easy to enforce a policy that only the current 
assignee of the bug may work on it. (I admit that the fact that this 
worked in LiveJournal is no surprise because nobody has CVS access there 
and people only submit patches to BugZilla. But even on Wikipedia, I 
suppose CVS access should be given only to responsible developers who 
will follow this rule.)

Any more questions? ;-)
Timwi