Core contributors commitment standard

[regis (Régis Behmo)]

I’m glad we can have an open conversation about work time as a metric. As far as I remember, at no point did we decide as a community to rely on work time to rank core contributors. I think it’s a tremendously important conversation to have.

@arbrandes

At first glance I don’t see many advantages to this over hours. It’s as poor a proxy as, say, measuring lines of code. For instance, I’ve sometimes spent months in a single ticket (ask @cmuniz about OEP-58), or days and weeks agonizing over bugs that were fixed by a single character (thanks, C pointers).

Right, I’ve been there as well. In such as situation, I think it would be fair to say that you closed a “nightmare”-level issue, right? This would grant you a badge that recognizes that you have extensive experience with Open edX. Because beginner contributors are unable to resolve difficult/nightmare issues.

I think that we should not be ranking core contributors according to any single metric or KPI. As soon as we start relying on a single KPI, that metric instantly becomes flawed because people start optimizing for it. But “time spent on a issue” is an even worse metric because the incentive becomes for contributors to become less efficient. Core contributors are rewarded for spending more time on any single issue. For instance if I spend 50 hours working on a few easy issues I will be catapulted to the top of the core contributor leaderboard. I think everyone would agree that we do not want to encourage this kind of behaviour.

@jill

I agree that time is a flawed metric, but I also think it’s the only common currency that we share, and so I think it’s the best one we have.

If we agree it’s a flawed metric, then please let’s not use it to rank contributors! We do not need to rank core contributors, so let’s stop doing it.

I think that this metric is actually worse than “flawed”: it’s downright terrible and toxic. Consider this from the perspective of an Open edX outsider. Would you join an open source project that encourages presenteeism? Where your contributions are unfairly compared people who work full-time on the project? Have we seen this metric being used in any other successful open source project? This metric acts as a deterrent for other people to join the project.

@jill

This came up at the BoF where we had these initial discussions, because someone asked whether donating $$ could be another way to become a core contributor. I don’t remember if there was a consensus about the idea of donating $$, but the value in it was in buying time for someone to contribute, which to me, strengthens the argument that time is the currency of interest here.

This is a great point.

What behaviour do we want to encourage? I think that we can all agree that we do want to attract $ donations, right? So we need to find a way to publicly recognize the impact of financial donations and sponsorship. From this perspective, I think that we should include financial sponsors in the CC program. Sponsors would not receive CC positions, but it would make sense to create an unlimited number of “CC sponsor” seats.

@jill

It’s true that some people can earn more $$ for their hours, but I don’t think that makes the time “worth more” to the individual that donates that time. The value to the community may be higher from one CC to the next, but the cost of the gift is the same – each of us has the same number of hours in a day.

This is false. The fact that an individual can earn more money per hour definitely makes their time worth more. When they contribute for free to an open source project the loss of opportunity means they will make less money. So the cost of the “gift” is not the same at all.

Anyhow, I’m not asking either that we rank core contributors by hourly rate, or the financial value of their contributions. Just to reiterate my position: we should not be ranking core contributors at all.

@jill

I also acknowledge that working for OpenCraft biases me here – we’re contractors, so we’re accustomed to measuring everything in hours, and so the reporting part isn’t onerous to us. But we’re also not demanding perfect accuracy in reporting either – CCs can volunteer as much granularity and detail as they want to.

Reporting hours isn’t onerous to me either. This is not an issue for me. What is an issue is that reporting hours makes me feel like another cog in the machine. It’s killing the joy of contributing to an open source community. I want to feel like I’m a unique snowflake, not a nine to five employee – and I suspect many other contributors are like me.

@arbrandes

I have a third option to propose: what if we decoupled any kind of objective tally from implicit or explicit requirements, instead relying on a decentralized, communal mechanism to periodically check whether a CC is still up to the task? We already vote to let people in. All that would be missing is a way to vote people out.

Let’s ask the same question again: what do we want to achieve? What sort of behaviour do we want to encourage? I want to encourage people to fix issues, implement features, make interesting conference/meetup talks, communicate with the community, etc. So let’s do that! This is basic management: let’s start by publicly acknowledging the contributions of individual community members who make exceptional work.