Tracking contributions

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> You're looking for a metric like "number of questions answered" or
> "number of people helped" for #fedora.  Helpdesk type hours would
> certainly be helpful for #fedora, regardless of how you track your
> metrics, but there's more to being helpful than punching in and I think
> that is what you want to be tracking.

tracking number of people helped would actually be more effort than
just clocking in office hours.  There is a balance to be struck.  I'm
not expecting to be able to have answers to everything that i could
ask for with the granularity i could ever hope for.  We need metrics
that means something but also minimize the amount of extra work by the
contributors.  For other areas, we have tools that we require to use
that produce their own interaction logs that we can datamine.  The
technical processes we have in place build in useful interaction
logging that we can make use of.  Trying to mine irc logs or even
mailinglist threads for subtle things like 'number of users helped'
may simply be out of reach of what we can effectively toolize. So to
answer those questions we end up asking people to 'clock-in' every
time they do the unit of work as an extra step just to do the
metric...that's not what we want.  That isn't to say that someone
couldn't create the necessary ircbot that fedora helpers could
register units of work with.. if that is what the particular group of
contributors wants to do to provide a metric.
All I ask is that when we set up new groups, the group of contributors
who are going to be working on that task think provide a metric for us
to trend and agree to use that metric as part of startup phase of the
new group's workflow.  The processes of organizing the work need to
include a metric we can trend. For the case of #fedora like helpdesk
work, organizing officehours helps provides 24/7 coverage as a goal
for the group and at the same time we can use that information to
trend contributions.

So back to the original question... mentoring which is not the same as
what a #fedora helpdesk does.  I don't think anyone has come up with a
mentoring process or workflow that incorporates something we can
trend.

-jef