Re: [RFC] Measuring skills of a Debian Developer
On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 10:01:30AM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Please don't send a copy of your response, if any, both to me and the
> list. Send it to the list only, unless you really only want to talk to
> me, in which case send it to me only. Thank you.
>
It's because all mail clients I'm using are flawed this way or
another including mutt. Many people are comfortable with cc'ing
to debian-devel though... You may setup a filter to suit incoming
mail to your needs, also. I dunno. I'm sending to debian-devel only
in hope that this will make you a person content with his inbox.
> Eray Ozkural <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>:
> > 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.
>
> Again, why? The current system of mail messages like "I need help with
> foo, can someone help?" and "foo needs to be done, could someone do it,
> please?" seems to work fine, without any bureaucracy.
I didn't mean for bureucracy. My point was efficiency. Mailing lists
aren't the ultimate solution to virtual communities, especially if
those groups intend to achieve big projects like, say Debian.
Contrary to your point... Do you suppose BTS is too bureucratic or just
the kind of automated infrastructure required to track down bugs in
a gigantic software distribution? The latter.
Or take WNPP (which is part of bts as you should note) Why don't we simply
discard WNPP and post ITPs, RFPs, ITAs right on the mailing list? Why
not? Because the simple formalism that WNPP (or similarly BTS) provides
doesn't bring in the bureucracy that one might doubt. But it gives us such
efficiency and reliability in the matter that it's been designed to deal
with; ity has seen utmost acceptance and very successful use.
I guess if Lee Sproull were here, she would have termed the use of such
services "social technology" which can be made to work for the better
of this community.
I'm too tired now, but I'll be delighted to learn about your opinions
on such "social infrastructure" ideas that might actually be useful.
Debian is one of the privileged places where such ideas can be invented
and tested! Advogato or slashdot are toy things compared to what's being
done here... Imagine now that you were accessing this text from a system
that supercedes usenet and that you had somehow been able to find this
text by its content, say its subject being "developing social technology"
and I'd been kindly requesting from interested people to put some thought
into designing a volunteer-task matching system. A bit of imagination doesn't
kill. ;)
Thanks,
PS: Stick with what works? That doesn't always work ;)
--
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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