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. -- Thomas Eibner <http://thomas.eibner.dk/> DnsZone <http://dnszone.org/> mod_pointer <http://stderr.net/mod_pointer> <http://photos.eibner.dk/> !(C)<http://copywrong.dk/> <http://apachegallery.dk/> Putting the HEST in .COM <http://www.hestdesign.com/>
