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Re: Better contribution recognition

Re: Better contribution recognition

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Re: Better contribution recognition

by
MoaHub, Graeme Gellatly
- 04/04/2018 12:34:26
Its funny the forums were brought up.  As soon as Odoo introduced the karma based stuff, I never visited again apart from 1 comment about 12 months ago.  Prior to that I think I was the number 3 poster of all time behind Fabien and gem. 

I think you need to be very careful of adverse consequences when trying to add an extrinsic motivator to something which is inherently intrinsically motivated (contribute to a public good).  Especially if those incentives arbitrarily value one activity over another, leaving a group feeling unvalued.  Or if they feel those motivators are trying to influence their choice of what they work on, or how much they do (freedom to choose is a big part of intrinsic motivation).

There is a lot of research into motivations of Open Source contributors and the extrinsically motivated ones are the ones either paid to do it (e.g. by their company), offloading technical debt or else they look to the management and administration of projects and see it as a career step/enhancer. (This is not a complete list by any stretch, it is not as black/white as presented here e.g. just because you get paid to do it doesn't make you extrinsically motivated, it is if you do it because you are paid to, and there is a third group called internalized extrinsic which kind of sits in the middle). 
Intrinsically motivated developers contribute by far the most effort and of the highest quality because, without being too simple, they care more (pride, learning new skills, creating something for the world etc) and as a result usually have far deeper and wider knowledge of the code base and stay longer with projects.

Personally for me, as far as I'd go is anyone who reviews a PR, raises a bug report, signs a CLA, has a PR merged, runs a repo, sits on the board etc etc in a given year gets an [Valued] OCA Contributor 2018 laptop sticker.  If Holger turns up with 12 stickers in 2030, people will know.

In terms of what I interpret Holger as saying, I don't want contributors who do nothing but raise PR's and never do any of the other work, or when they do they just give +1 reviews.  A leaderboard for contributors will only make that worse.  People already game app store numbers.  Making life easier for proven contributors (commit rights, lower review requirements, priority PR's as examples) by recognising the trust you have in them I think is far better.



On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 7:47 PM, Axel Mendoza <aekroft@gmail.com> wrote:

Umm something like Odoo Forum karma... Interesting. I have found there an incentive to contribute and share with others and I know a lot of people that find that as an incentive too. So yeah I think that could work.

Best Regards

On Wed, Apr 4, 2018, 02:02 Holger Brunn <hbrunn@therp.nl> wrote:
> Maybe there other good ideas out there.



> What would you suggest the OCA to do?

I'm musing for a long time about something I call OCA karma.

In a very rough version you'd start out with +10 when you submit your
CLA. For every PR you open, you lose a karma point, for every
review/merge you get one. When your karma is zero, you can't open new
PRs (and maybe existing ones are demoted somehow). Or we could order PRs
by current karma of the author.

Sounds simple enough, but there are quite some complications: There are
PRs which actually should increase karma (greenifying PRs mostly;
hotfixes), how to avoid sick incentives (If we for example give extra
karma for merging a PR, people might get sloppy and merge prematurely),
how to deal with bullshit reviews made just for increasing one's own
karma? Do issues have an effect on karma and if yes, which? How to make
the above less single minded technical?

But I think above complications can be worked out if a few people look
into it. This should also have some kind of decay, so that people like
me can't sit on previous work for years.




-- 
Therp - Maatwerk in open ontwikkeling

Holger Brunn - Ontwerp en implementatie

mail: holger@therp.nl
web: http://therp.nl
phone: +31 (0)20 3093096

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