Re: New-Maintainer - Some Facts
On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 03:52:25PM +0000, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> I'd like to provide some facts that, I hope, will make clear that the DAM
> is _not_ the bottleneck being portayed by some impatient applicants.
Regardless of the specific time delays, it is of concern to me that we have
only one DAM (it doesn't matter who he is or how much time he has). Even if
this DAM had all the time of the world and would do nothing but to process
applicants, it is important that we have a reserve in case James becomes
suddenly unavailable. It is important that we have somebody who knows how to
continue the work then, and why not have this person help out before that
critical moment, too?
More than one DAM also distributes the individual waiting times more
unifromly among the waiting time interval (because supposedly all DAMs work
independently of each other), so it will be a more smooth operation. We
don't have enought numbers to know this for sure, but I think part of the
problem might be that the DAM is processing people in bunches, so some wait
long and some not at all, resulting in a good average time. But as I said,
this can not be concluded from these numbers.
In fact, I find it hard to derive any useful information from the numbers
you posted[1]. Just as an example, they don't include the amount of work required
for each step. Working through the application process is time intensive (as it
depends on the communication between two people), while creating an account is
probably time intensive sometimes and often not (James said this depends partly
on the review created by the AM). This suggests that the 29 avg time for DAM
approval weights more than the 43 avg application process time.
Thanks,
Marcus
[1] We all know these books "how to lie with statistics" etc. If not, you
should get one and read it, it's important for your life.
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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