Fedora Developer Ranking System v1

[Warren Togami]

Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> 
> I think the specific proposal is too complex.  (It _is_ a strawman,
> after all!)  But I like the idea of doing something like this.  The
> incentives are nice, but I'm more interested in allowing people to
> choose their level of participation in a particular part of the project.

The strawman ranking system doesn't get in the way of choosing levels of 
participation if all you are interested in is watching some things, 
owning others, and hacking others.

The strawman rankings system is primarily a merit tracker. 
Responsibilities or watches can be assigned or subscribed as needed 
outside of the ranks.  Thus you only participate in ranks if you want 
to.  I suspect this is reasonable if you are interested in community 
policy and technical governance (which most developers are not.)

> For example, there are a large number of packages that I care about, but
> I don't need to own.  I just want to be informed when there are changes.
> Or if someone is doing translations for a particular package, they
> should be able to watch that package for changes and jump in when that
> happens.  As near as I can tell that's not easy right now.  Some
> examples of the kinds of things that I'm talking about:
> 
> o Watcher - "I care about this package."
> o Developer - "I should be consulted when there are major changes to
> this package."

I believe what you want are different types of "subscriptions" in order 
to watch specific things that you care about?

> o Owner - "I am accountable for changes in this package.  The buck stops
> here."
> o Hacker - "I can make changes to this package."
(but not own it)

> 
> (Extra bonus points to Red Hat people who know where these four things
> come from.)
> 
> People will naturally work their way up the stack, and this is more
> self-descriptive than just numbers.  And I would think in terms of
> responsibilities, not merit badges.  We want delegation to scale here.
> 

I believe *some* merit system (be it Bugzilla and/or ranks) will be 
useful.  I am just brain storming possibilities.  After the basics of 
PackageDB and koji are driving the distro workflow, we may more 
seriously think about how a merit system can augment or enhance this.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com