Hi Vladimir;
and first off, thanks a bunch for your comments. Some thoughts on that,
on my part again:
> > eventually, the kind of "reward" making things interesting to
>
> The key word here is "eventually" and in my opinion the word means -
> something could happen someday. That is not a thing developer can
> count on in his business.
It depends, from my point of view. In some cases people want a
more-or-less immediate reward for things they did, in others knowing
that getting active actually helps resolving / fixing issues one
stumbled across in day-to-day work in itself is a "good" reward, too.
I've been dealing with proprietary, "pay-to-get-any-information"
software long enough to know how to estimate this kind of "open-ness"
as well as this kind of being able to address problems and get them
resolved, to be "heard" without being required to throw €10k at a
problem unsure to know whether or not your issue will/can be fixed in
time, at all. I want good tools, I want work done, and anything that
gets me there is fine. I would be in FishCAT/NetCAT/whatever, too, if
there were no point/reward concepts at all.
> Again the word "eventually" kill my interest to participate actively
> instantly.Beside this your hope to make direct connections is not
> scalable at all.
I think it is. Most open source projects work just like that. In most
situations, of course, it's a matter of governance, of sorting,
prioritizing, getting enhancement requests set straight. After all, its
a voluntary thing, and no one needs to really participate. So I am not
sure whether energy should be spent in/on attracting people
demanding/expecting an immediate reward for their doings or if/whether
we should focus on people ready and willing to contribute, for
whichever reasons that might be. Nevertheless, feel free to prove me
wrong here anyone - why are you folks hanging out on FishCAT? How much
does an active scheme of reward matter to you?
> I mean if only a few people participating in Fishcats
> then your plan could work but the program itself will be failure.We
> need to establish reliable way to get benefits from participating in
Closed development cycles => closed products. Open development cycles
with a community invited to provide input and feedback => products
better suiting the needs of at the very least these users who cared to
provide feedback. ;) Consider this as an "alternate" solution to, say,
buying Oracle/... support and have issues fixed more or less quickly
and "at a price", I wonder whether this really is that unreliable...
> It's easy one to fix. The issue filler will get some score only after
> review and confirmation from quality engineer from Oracle.
Yes, that is possible, but it also introduces a whole load of new
bureaucracy which would not be there if people "just" were about to
report findings and provide feedback on what they stumbled upon rather
than virtually "hunting for flaws" and reporting each and any minor
annoyance they could find just to have a chance of being entitled to
some reward.
Maybe however it needs to be a, say, more "flexible" system. What about
an approach like this:
- The "run-off-do-work-report-issues" approach, working the same way
FishCAT used to work by now, by users using the server, providing
feedback on issues they find, in exchange for that knowing to be in
touch with the right engineers to have these issues resolved.
"Reward", asides having issues fixed/addressed, eventually same as
now.
- The "coordinated-testing" approach, done by people adopting certain
pre-defined test cases / frameworks to test on the server / ... . In
such cases, people are likely to spend more effort on things than
they do by "just" trying to get their application to run on a new
version of Glassfish, so maybe this would ask for some reward to
"pay" this additionale effort?
> That why I'm suggesting to make virtual currency instead of plain
> points.You will be able to earn the currency in many ways. For
> example helping on forums, suggesting new features, making demo or
> promoting the product. I will describe in details how it should work
> in the document that I will have prepared by Monday.
I am looking forward to reading that. :)
> Sun had problems in this respect. Just a couple examples to prove my
> view.Dukes that developers could earn on the forums didn't have any
> power and didn't provide any real incentive to developers who earned
> them. Voting points for project issues also was completely useless.
Yes. But talking about the "Dukes" points: I see that the Sun forums,
in many fields, were next to empty _despite_ the existence of something
like "Dukes" as a schema of, at the very least, collecting some
"points" for being active, whereas there are forums out there which are
_way_ more active, with users that have provided > 1000 substantial,
kind, helpful post with _no_ reward schema whatsoever being in place.
From this point of view, I dare to say that a "reward approach"
obviously is not the only thing to attract people...
> again to prove my point.Author of "Firebug" if I remember correctly
> worked on his product at least one year. One day he asked for
> supporting his work or he couldn't continue it in the same way as
> before.I don't really know what kind of support he got from
> developers but I definitely know that he dropped his work on the
> project.You probably know that Firebug actively in use by millions of
> developers.
Yes. It happens once in a while, to both open source and closed source
"sold" products/projects. I don't think that something like this can be
resolved by some sort of "reward" scheme as, in my opinion, it is a
completely different problem, it is a problem of people seeing "value"
in things which are free-of-charge. The very moment people see "open
source" just as a matter of something you can download and use for
free and forget about people actually investing work and effort into
this, things are lost. Open source needs an attitude of collaboration
and contribution to work, and, as far as I see in example on apache,
codehaus, eclipse and elsewhere, this works - by people using, testing,
contributing code, documentation, ... - and all this almost completely
without any rewarding scheme, leaving "community acknowledgement" aside
for a moment.
> Kristian, please think again about motivation engine.
It is interesting, we used to have a discussion almost like this
yesterday in the evening during our JUG meeting (which I happened to
organize as I am one of the founders of our JUG). We were talking about
how to attract more people, and we came down to seeing that, actually,
it is just a very "special" kind of people willing to be there, willing
to spend time and effort besides their day-to-day work to come see such
events, to participate in coordinating and setting up new ones, to
communicate and keep things rolling. All in itself, there _never_ is
any rewarding involved - the people who do that do that for the sake of
it, indeed driven by curiosity, enthusiasm, fun to be had with the
technology they use and, to some degree, the desire to communicate, to
exchange experiences and thoughts with other, like-minded people.
Again, anyone, feel free to prove me wrong here, but I am convinced
that this is a _strong_ motivation and driving force, and one wonders
whether it might be the kind of motivation to attract reliable, active
people. As a German business consultant used to say: "Be careful to
hire people who just come here for the money. Those who come here for
the money always will be ready and willing to leave for money." I think
there is truth in that. ;)
K.
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