Adam Kennedy wrote:
Of course some authors don't care about having a community around their
software, and some don't consider their CPAN package as "important" or
"big" enough to warrant a community (despite it probably being licensed
with an open source-friendly license). These people are entirely free to
continue do nothing. :)
Yes, but we've seen what happens once the metrics are created. The natural
competitive nature of people comes out and they start doing things just
because there's a metric for it.
This, to me, is a good thing - ripe for exploitation! :-D
There's nothing as cool as letting strangers do good things (like contribute to
an open source community) just by allowing them to do what's natural. :)
Any metric that catches bad things, particularly bad technical things, is
going to be just fine.
Metrics that try to push "good" behavior are fraught with trouble, because
they start pushing people in odd directions.
Do you have an example on this? (Any pointer would be wonderful.)
I think it's important that we take some care about the metrics that get
created that encourage people to take "good" behaviors (as opposed ones that
just encourage "not-bad" behavior).
Agreed. Giving good names to new META.yml fields and documenting them in a
complete, terse way that isn't open to (mis-) interpretation should be done
_before_ any implementation. (Especially when it comes to something that can
affect community growth in some significant way. :)
Finally, I don't personally see an obvious (causative or otherwise) link
between a non-author community support channel, and module Kwalitee (or
quality for that matter).
CPAN modules are all (?) Free Software/Open Source projects, and with all such
projects, the feature, code and documentation "quality" is in many ways a
product of the amount of attention it is given. More attention => better
products ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", you know).
It's obviously not as easy as that - one still needs to attract people that
care, have time and enough competency to contribute in a positive way, and then
actually allow and motivate these people to contribute in the way they like.
Still if we are going to find more people that want to contribute/become part
of the community, then we need to do all kinds of marketing - including telling
users that if they use Perl, they'll easily find both the useful CPAN software
and the communities around that software.
How to attract people to the Perl community:
1) Show them Perl and it's community exists
2) Show them what kind of useful options they get from Perl and the community
3) Let them try out the things they want to - easily
4) Show them where to find help when they need it <--- WE'RE IMPROVING THIS
5) Show them we'd like their feedback (and bug reports (and patches))
6) Allow them to give back to/help the community when they feel ready
7) Allow them to become project developers when they feel ready
(I'm sure this list is missing some crucial points, but I hope it still makes
some sense. :)
- Salve
--
Salve J. Nilsen <salvejn at met dot no> / Systems Developer
Norwegian Meteorological Institute http://met.no/
Information Technology Department / Section for Development
