Hi,
in several mails (not only the quoted mail) people were talking about
qualitative measures in terms of failure vs. success and we now even
try to apply a quantitaive measure:
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 03:45:13PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> E.g. (note, numbers are *entirely hypothetical*): if the event costs
> $1,000,000 and the team promises they can raise earmarked sponsorship of
> $900,000, so that Debian is only responsible for net $100,000; but Debian
> only gets $40,000 total value from it; then this is a net loss for Debian.
> It's important to recognize this as a -$60,000 proposition, not a $40,000
> one.
>
> If you disagree with this formulation, please let me know.
If I were DPL I would disagree.
I perfectly understood the "*entirely hypothetical*" constraint in the
mail and I need to disagree anyway. IMHO there is no measure for a
success of DebConf and the mail above inspired me to think whether there
might be any measure we could apply.
At first considering the monetary value of a DebConf. How to measure it?
Lines of code written times some fictive value of money (in the way they
calcualted linux kernel value or similar)? Most probably not.
Number of people at DebConf? I don't think so.
Number of exchanged GPG signatures to prove that people really met and
not only were on the same place? Also no.
Number of talks held? Also a clear no.
Byte count of IRC logs to include people who joined DebConf from remote?
Kinds of cheese + wine at cheese & wine party?
Portions of food served / pints of beer consumed?
Time of mao game times number of people joined the game?
Or down to the basic things like number of shower facilities per person?
What I want to say is: There is neither any objective nor most probably
any subjective measure to declare a DebConf a success or failure. The
only thing we can really measure is the surplus / dept a DebConf
created. I also would not fully agree that this number is correlated
linearly to the attribute success / failure of the DebConf and we all
were aware from the point of the decision that the local team has a hard
time this year. The decision was in favour of "lets do a different
DebConf in 2013" and so we should stick to it. But please if you are
using the terms success and failure please state explicitely on what
measure you are relying because otherwise others might fail to
understand you.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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