Ian Clarke writes: >> This is not what I said: I said that if the task is less than a week of >> work, it’s too small to merit discussing it. Volunteer time is too >> valuable for that. > It is what you said, from your previous email: > If it can be done in less than a week, we should just do it right away instead > of discussing how much time it requires.
This is not the intended meaning of “do it right away”: If the task takes less than a week, it’s not worth putting value on it in the shared decision making process. Reason for using weeks: People are much worse at understanding money than at understanding time. I think the reason is that when you’re employed, and you earn for example $2000 per month, you can only actually spend 10% of that freely and the rest is bound. So it feels like you’re working one month for $200, while in reality you produce value of at least $5000 for your employer every month. That’s why I’d say “use person-weeks”. Also that avoids discussing in anything below $1000 increments. Finally you need to take the time spent on the method into the cost calculation. And in a Free Software project, communication overhead per topic discussed is much higher than when you have a meeting in person: More people involved and a less efficient communication method (writing and reading instead of speaking). Take the cost calculation you do for a meeting, then multiply it with 10 (or more). That’s why we (need to) document requirements, code style, and how to contribute, instead of waiting for people to ask. And it’s why we have to trust small subgroups to do the right thing instead of using exact centralized subtask-by-subtask tracking. Just getting the information needed for that kind of tracking costs more in communication overhead than it gains in coordination. As an example: My emails in this thread already costed at least €100: half a person day. Likely quite a bit more. I do that because I think saving all participants from having to allocate 1000 units of value reduces cost by more. > I have further ideas on which online tools we can use to implement this, I’m > thinking Google Docs, but let’s agree on the principles before we get too much > into the mechanism. OK. Just keep in mind that this method must include all Freenet users and developers. Any method which excludes some group does not fit the requirements set out in the news item we published (nor the ones I see). Best wishes, Arne -- Unpolitisch sein heißt politisch sein ohne es zu merken
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