Tracking contributions

Tue Jun 3 01:54:43 UTC 2008

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 17:34 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Jun 2008 12:41:10 -0800
> "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Why do you need to track that?
> > 
> > 
> > Why does any volunteer organization want to keep track of the amount
> > of time individuals are committing and what things they are doing?  We
> > want to make sure we are putting human resources into the overall
> > project in a way that we aren't creating bottlenecks, or worse in a
> > way that is wasteful.  The most critically important resource we have
> > is available volunteer time and goodwill, and we need to start looking
> > seriously at how well we are managing those resources as they come
> > into the door.  We need to make sure that when we encourage people to
> > participate we are doing it a way that we are asking people to spend
> > time in a way that makes a positive impact. And we need to find ways
> > to measure that impact.  If we think mentoring is a good idea, then we
> > need to try to measure that impact. But we cant really gauge impact
> > unless we have a reasonable estimate of the manhours going in. More
> > important for me we need to try to make a long term effort to trend
> > the impact of different areas of 'contribution' that we stand up.
> > Unless we attempt to track manhours spent in different areas how do we
> > ever really get a handle on whether we need to push one area over
> > another through a project wide recruitment program?   Different parts
> > of the project are going to grow organically on their own...but not
> > necessarily at the same rate. As one bit grows it can create growing
> > pains for other groups, and its exactly this sort of imbalance that we
> > need to watch out for and respond to via recruitment drives.
> 
> Fair enough.  Good points.  And I agree that having such data would be
> great for planning, etc.
> 
> Now, you have issues with all of that too.
> 
> 1) How do you do it across the Project as a whole without resorting to
> a "timecard" that contributors punch.
> 
> 2) How do you get around the fact that some people might not want their
> contribution time tracked?
> 
> 3) How do you account for transient contributors?  E.g. The overall
> contribution time for a particular area may stay the same across two
> different time periods.  It could be all from the same contributor
> base, or it could be spread across a bunch of different contributors
> that come and go.  The wiki would likely be a decent example of the
> latter.
> 
> Or, put another way, do we want to track contributor retention?  (See
> lkml thread from last week for a similar discussion and the
> observations they saw there.)
> 
> 4) How do you balance "paid for" time vs. volunteer time?  Both are
> invaluable, and it's a fine line to walk in some cases.
> 
> 5) How do you quantify "intangibles" like helping people on #fedora?
> 
> 6) How do you actively "recruit" people to areas that need help without
> driving them away altogether?
> 
> None of those are easy questions, and I don't really expect answers in
> a reply immediately.  But they are things that need to be carefully
> considered if we're going to implement any kind of manhour tracking.
> Hopefully the Board (and/or FESCo) can work on those in the next term.

Before the Board starts working on these issues, there needs to be some
sort of consensus that any sort of time tracking is needed and workable.
The number and quality of your questions here, both high, are similar to
what we've heard others say before about time tracking, and tell me that
consensus doesn't exist yet.  This list is where those things should be
figured out, not by the Board in a meeting that the community can't see
or hear.

If this were a brick-and-mortar volunteer organization, time tracking
would be easy -- you'd see it in the shifts people cover.  Our project
doesn't lend itself well to that kind of tracking for obvious reasons.
(How would we track someone's work on a git repo while they're on a
cross-country flight?)

I've always thought that time measurement was not as good a metric in
this case as the level of support one is giving to one's fellow project
members.  And the unfortunate fact is that kind of measurement is more
qualitative and thus exponentially more difficult.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
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  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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