Re: [RFC] Measuring skills of a Debian Developer
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Apart of the sheer impracticality of getting any meaningful
> rating system short of a well put together exam, there is the
> question, what for? If you can't figure out the level of expertise of
> people based on the body of their work, then their skill level is
> unlikely to impact you in any meaningful fashion.
Instead of the rant, you might try to put together an actually
useful idea from this weird suggestion. Of course getting people
to test each other's skills such as coding or documentation
is beyond the scope of Debian project. Granted that, a useful
idea could be some sort of automated volunteer tracking system.
Something that wouldn't be discriminating and would be more
socially plausible. You know, friendship, co-operation, etc.
Without assuming too much :)
I think you could do such a thing without really rating people
about their perl wisdom or kernel hacking experience. A simple
system to match volunteers to tasks. Kind of like WNPP extended
a bit. The idea is about specifying certain skills. Each developer
gives his estimate of how useful he could be in that area, or
how much he'd like to work in that area. Then of course there's
the collection of tasks to be done. Like the GNU task list.
So far nice. Now, the system keeps track of how many tasks each
developer has completed, and tries to do some sort of load balancing
among developers. A peer review mechanism could also be added, so
for instance after some time (perhaps computed according to a
"hardness" criterion) a reviewer is assigned to that developer to
kindly check on the status of his work. Then, a number of paths
toward solution might be thought. For instance, failure to reply
to the reviewer would imply giving the task to someone else. Or
the developer could ask for assist and surely working in groups
should be possible...
You can fill in the details if your IQ's really above 100.
Thanks,
__
exa
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