"hacking the social system"

[Jesse Haubrich]

How about a bounty system?  If a user wants something done they can
offer a bounty.  The committee can establish a forum to handle the
exchange of communication and money between users and developers.

Praise is a good thing, but I'm not sure it's the motivational force for
most developers?

-Jesse Haubrich

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 07:51 -0700, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> My favorite developer :-) posted this:
> 
> http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_aseigo_archive.html
> 
> <<
> when a software developer wants a program to do something, they usually 
> scratch that itch and do something about it. so why is it that when the 
> users have a problem with the social scene, they don't try and scratch 
> their itch? why don't they try and hack the social system?
> 
> i bet if these users put their heads together they could create some 
> (social) system that would coax and encourage developers in the 
> direction they'd like. and no, bitching on the internet doesn't count as 
> a social system.
> 
> so all you disgruntled users: scratch your itch. come up with some sort 
> of system that works for you and invite the developers to it. make it 
> inviting. make it worth our while and your while. you're the only ones 
> who know what you want. so hack the system to get it.
>  >>
> 
> Classic Skinnerian (behaviorist) Psychology
> 
> http://www.bartleby.com/61/32/S0453250.html
> 
> tells us what to do to hack the social system.  We need to change the 
> "contingencies of reinforcement".  If you have no idea what this is, 
> please use Google (> 3K hits).
> 
> Basically, we need to find ways for rewarding developers for doing what 
> we want.  For the issue of conforming to the design guidelines, we need 
> to award their applications certification that they conform to the KDE 
> UI guidelines.  For usability in general, we need to praise applications 
> that have good usability.
> 
> Now, I don't know exactly how to do this, but I am just opening the 
> subject for everyone to kick around -- that is something that engineer 
> types do.
> 
> It would appear to me that for the certification that we would need a 
> free standing committee to make the decisions by first discussion and 
> then a vote.  Perhaps we should have Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and 
> Rhodium certification levels corresponding to the percentage of yes 
> votes.  And somewhere on the Wiki where we post this information.  Note 
> that we would NOT tell anyone what to do, but when they did it the way 
> the we considered correct, we would praise them.
> 
> We could also offer help by either reports or patches.
>