[kde-announce] Announcing KDE 3.2

[Don Sanders]

On Friday 06 February 2004 19:59, Karl-Heinz Zimmer wrote:
> On Freitag, 6. Februar 2004 02:34, Don Sanders wrote:
> > On Friday 06 February 2004 06:08, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> > > On Thursday 05 February 2004 12:53, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> > > > Something needs to be done on our wishlist entries. I will
> > > > start a project to expire wishes that got not enough votes
> > > > in enough time. But for that the load needs to decrease a
> > > > bit on our servers as I hope bugzilla gets some hits when
> > > > I announce that ;)
> > >
> > > Again, this is something that fits nicely into the Quality
> > > Team framework. Let the people who are Quality Managers for
> > > whatever area handle bug triage and prioritization of wishes.
> >
> > As a contributor I highly value the freedom to decide what I
> > work on, this freedom has great value to me.
> >
> > I like the bug voting system and help use it to decide the
> > priority of improvements I want to work on. If the Quality
> > Managers are interested in affecting my prioritization of
> > wishes I'm interested in working on then they can contact me
> > for my commercial KDE development rates.
>
> Besides from the last sentence sounding a bit dramatically
> I fully agree: urging developers to do this or that would not
> work in most cases since: it reduced freedom == it reduces fun.
>
> Perhaps we need another way to handle this problem:
>
>    What about trying to form a team of people who do nothing
>    else than fixing bugs?
>
> Of course 'nothing else' means: in respect to this project.
> (Surely these people would have to eat and sleep and have
>  a live besides from bug fixing...)
>
> These people could be called the Free Software Heroes or perhaps
> the BugCops or something similar, e.g. http://bugcops.org is
> waiting since years to be filled with serious content...
>
> The basic idea is:
>
>    If there is somebody who does not have the time for continuous
>    serious contributions in a project, perhaps she/he might be
>    interested in 'random' contributions: if there is 1 free hour
>    it might be enough to fix a bug and make the project a little
>    bit better by doing so?
>
> The vanitor could be like a 'coach' assisting/coordinating
> these BugCops:
>     * help them figure out how a project's code is organized
>       to make them get started in understanding it
>     * prevent them from doing duplitace work
>     * test their patches to see if they are OK to be sent
>       to the maintainer
>     * make sure to nicely remember the maintainer in case
>       a patch seems to be forgotten
>     * ...
>
> Would this be an option - or am I just dreaming wildly?  :-)

Just got back after a long weekend away.

I guess anyone could set up a BugCops community, to assist bug fixers.

The problem I worry about is how to attract and retain these people. I 
think publicly saying thanks to people who fix bugs (by naming them 
Heroes of whatever) is a good idea.

Being publicly thanked might be nice when it's a novelty, but in the 
long term I wonder if it is enough.

I think the actions of free people will inevitably result in conflict 
and that in order for a free community to scale a good well defined 
system for resolving conflicts is important. Another way of rewarding 
people besides saying thanks is by showing them respect by giving 
them power to help decide how conflicts are resolved (meritocracy).

Don.