On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 08:56:38AM -0400, Ben Hyde wrote:
> This comes up from time to time. Somebody measures something; bugs
> submitted, bugs fixes, lines written, commits made, documents written,
> mails send, bylaws written, meetings attended, email threads started,
> email threads ended, uses of the word 'bucket'...
>
> When it has come up before I have written variations of the following.
> Try not to take this as an attack on the volunteer or the messenger
> but ...
>
> I have very strong objections to nieve attempts to reduce the
> contributions made by various individuals into 'objective' scores and
> 'leader boards'.
>
> Projects thrive when diverse and complementary skills are brought
> together in a way to avoids rivalry.
>
> Skills are complementary when their measures are orthogonal. Often they
> are so orthogonal that one contributor couldn't for the love nor money fill
> the role another person is playing. I certainly could never fill
> Doug's shoes; he's a doer.
>
> In such an environment measures that are easily collected are certain to
> be seriously misleading and can trivially leave feelings hurt and create
> contests that lead to deadly disputes.
I agree, what I was more interested in was actually the sheer volume of
the mailinglist archive. These statistics weren't created for someone to
be offened and they aren't going generated on a regular basis anyway.
This was not an attempt to degrade anyone's effort on the Apache httpd
list.
> It is extremely hard to get people to remain detached about these things.
Very true.
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