Mark Leicester wrote:
But I see Mark's aims with the hall of fame more as a measurement tool for community participation than a way for people to show off. And in that way it can be considered to be a valuable resource. The problem however is that the raw number of posts says nothing about their quality, starting by not being able to distinguish questions and answers. The "rounds of applause" as I understand it is a way for people to express their gratefulness to people that helped them.
Yes Sylvain, this is what I am proposing: another (more measurable) way for people to express their gratefulness to people that have helped them. Is anyone else a user of 43things (see http://www.43things.com/)? The 43things "cheers" are a lovely example of this kind of thing, where people have a simple mechanism to encourage others. Read about cheers here: http://www.43things.com/about/view/cheers. The cheer carries no weight other than encouragement. The idea of 'targets', that is, collect 100 "rounds of applause" and progress to a notional 'next level', are optional.
Mark, you misunderstood (and snipped) the essence of my reply: distributing "bonus points" to people is a bad thing. And it's also not what 43things provide.
43things (just tried it this morning) allows people to list or propose things to do, and others to support them in doing these things. So this isn't the people that are given applauses, but ideas that are given support.
And this is radically different from a community dynamics point of view, as it doesn't provide a way for people to show off, but a way to identify and prioritize good ideas that come out of the community. This is actually similar to bugzilla entries of type "enhancement" on which people can vote, with a way more shiny GUI that makes it a usable tool (but bugzilla is far from good in this regard).
This is something I already outlined in several blog entries ([1] and [2]): the community is about collective thinking and supporting ideas proposed by people. The one(s) that actually implement the idea are those that either have time or most need it, and the result is owned by the group.
So having a "wanted features" or RT classification system is interesting, even if it overlaps with a less usable similar feature provided by the ASF infrastructure (BTW, what about Jira?). But having a people gratification system is a very different thing that is really not good.
Sylvain
[1] http://www.anyware-tech.com/blogs/sylvain/archives/000172.html [2] http://www.anyware-tech.com/blogs/sylvain/archives/000109.html
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
