[Obey M-F-T or die]
Here's the basic idea: turn bug-fixing into a game (a counterbalance
to the huge quantities of time which moon-buggy and frozen-bubble have
taken away from Debian development).
People register to play, and each month, all the players are given
three randomly selected bugs to tackle. Points are awarded to those
whose assigned bugs get fixed during that month, with the idea being
that people would endeavour to ensure their bugs get fixed swiftly, by
whatever means they can (closing spurious bug reports, sending patches
to the BTS, making NMUs, harassing the maintainer, or whatever).
Clearly some assigned bugs will be simpler than others, but difficulty
should average out over time. Also, players with more time to spend on
bugs can improve their position the next month by closing all the
non-bugs they can find, so that less dedicated players are less likely
to get easy bugs and thusly will score less. ;)
This is far from a full set of rules; far more details were covered in
the IRC discussion which spawned this. Lots of possible abuses were
discussed, and solutions found, so please refrain from responding
along those lines for now.
The interface should be extremely simple - once you've signed up, all
you have to do is to fix the bugs you get assigned, and a scoreboard
will get posted to some mailing list on a regular basis.
But, before I go implementing any of this, I want to know if people
are interested. So, if you think you'd like to try it, send mail to
asuffield-bug-of-the-month@debian.org. (From: addresses will be fed
into the subscription system once it's set up; if you change your mind
later, just ignore the confirmation message you get and it'll be the
last you hear about it). If I get enough responses over the next few
days, I'll write the formal rules and set up the scripts.
If you have ideas for a better name, send them to
asuffield-botm-name@debian.org.
[Kudos to Richard Braakman for coming up with the idea and helping
sketch out most of the details]