Stefan Good topic, thanks for raising it, it is time.
> Gump is an incredible idea and has no equivalent thing anywhere else. > Still, it requires lots of energy from the gumpmaisters to keep it running. > [...] > Gump social maintenance costs are still too high on the gumpmaisters > and not well distributed horizontally across the various projects. Stefano, I concur with your observations, and like your proposals, but I think we (as a group) keep overlooking one main thing. Gump is a social experiment but we keep using the techie's golden hammer -- more technology -- to try to solve it. Making things easier for users who don't care about what we do is just going to make it easier for them not to care. ;-) We have a social experiment, yet we've (so far) failed to exercise the social options. The Gump team know OSS, they know (as good as anybody) what drives folks, what motivates, what inspires. Even though we accept that nobody can engineer this, we can attempt to leverage it & work with it. Right after I posted to commons-dev about Gump, and it's aspirations to judging health, we had one gentleman go to the trouble of digging out the algorythm for FOG from Gumpy CVS, evaluating it, and submitting a JIRA entry (which I agree with, BTW). That is effort, that is motivation. The loss of "team pride" (maybe) of having their FOG factor halved was a motivator. I think Gump needs to get out there, go in-your-face public. Now that we are TLP we have a forum to get messages out (gump.apache.org) but we need to acquire traffic & work with existing public forums. We ought use community@ [or similar] and Peas-n-Carrots (& Planet Apache). I'm no marketeer, but I think we need to market Gump results -- not market Gump [although that might come], but the results. Some [RT] style ideas: - We need to post (weekly?) to community@ the top FOGs, top improvers and bottom FOGs. We need to be public about which projects are strong, which are upcoming, and which are failing w/o attention. It is fine to generate a WWW site of results, as we do, but we need to live-and-breath those results, make them reach out and touch people. - We need to get to a point where Gump is the first place somebody comes in order to determine if they wish to use a new product/package. A conversation around "why would we introduce a product with a FOG of 0.1 when we are at 1.5?" ought be common. - We need to make FOG (or Gump score, whatever) an active thing. Perhaps PMCs ought evaluate FOG before allowing a project out of sandbox, out of incubation. [Note this is *RT*, not proposal]. - I think we need a nice 'I rate with Gump' icon, that dynamically links to their score. [Before we do, we need the numbers to really mean something, and to take into consideration some key aspects -- depth of dependences, distance between two projects -- some Googlesque value of 'links to' (where teams are 'rating' each other through usage/referencing.) Gump stats are in their infancy, and not taking into consideration much of the value of the metadata graph. I think we ought add much more to it also, like 'friend of' (even if not a dependee). Maybe even add 'who associates with' (an individual aspect) -- so we can follow folks we like. I could go on and on and on ... and will w/ an [RT] sometime soon, I hope.] Along the lines of what Stefano said, but adding a little to the social aspect: - Perhaps we ought copy 'affected' projects on nags, so the recipient & those affected know who is affecting them. Nags are (right now) too personal/private & a team can quietly sit on them. [This said, I think we want to push the positives -- values of success -- not try nagging folks into action.] - Perhaps we 'nag' folks when their FOG goes up into the next level (a positive :-) and also when it drops down to another level. Yes, as Stefano said, we ought (occasionally) let folks know their status even if things are status quo. In summary -- my point is we've not explored the social solutions to the Gumpmeister headache, and I'd love to hear other ideas on how we could leverage that. regards Adam --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
