John McCreesh wrote:
So I like to think of OOo as a community of different projects, each
valuing their contributors according to how they contribute to that
project's aims.
I understand that OOo was modeled after Apache, which is definitely a
group of largely independent projects.
We maybe need some mechanism whereby people gain community points for
doing things, and maybe lose them for just creating noise on lists :-)
That might be either a fantastic idea or a horrible one depending on who
gets to assign the points. I can see two extremes that are obviously bad:
1) One person, or a small cliche get to assign points. So the points
would be little more than a list of so and so's favourite people.
2) Anyone at all can assign points. Inc. people who have no connection
with thep roject.
It's also important that the people who assign points also get points
assigned to them and vice versa. Otherwise you just get a cliche. One
idea is to say that people with the Observer status assign points to
each other.
I like your idea because it helps quantify where people's opinions lie.
If you and I have a disagrement on list, it is likely that I will think
that most people agree with me and you will think that most people agree
with you. That's just human nature. Having an actual number may help. Of
course, there are known problems with polls. For example, people with
strongest opinions are most likely to vote, so you can get a biased
sample. An example of this is the "Linux vs GNU/Linux" argument. In
average, people who go for "GNU/Linux" feel more strongly about their
choice, so they are over-represented in polls. But alas, some times a
poll is the best tool available.
Secret ballots have well known advantages. So that's good too.
We might consider extending the system to include decisions, and not
just opinions about people. Of course, the ideal is that a decision will
be reached by concensus. But when it's obvious that concensus will never
be formed, a vote can be a way to prevent a never-ending argument.
In brief: though I wouldn't recommend polls for everything, there are
places where they can be invaluable. I like the idea of using more votes.
I don't know of any software that provides the point system you
suggested, but I do know of an excellent internet voting system, the
Condorcet Internet Voting Service.
http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/~andru/civs/
Condorcet voting is ideal for situations where you have more than one
candidate (e.g. choosing a slogan). It allows people to rank the
candidates in order of preference and it gives the result that most
people are satisfied with. I could talk for hours about why Condorcet is
the best method, but I'll skip that.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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