Thomas Eibner wrote: > One volunteer has already come forward to help us gather data and we've > compiled some statistics from this mailinglist showing how many posts > each person has made since '95: > > Total Posts on [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 87510 > > 1: ...
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. It is extremely hard to get people to remain detached about these things. - ben
