[python-advocacy] Thought: Using LinkedIn to reward open-source developers

[Tennessee Leeuwenburg]

I have a two-tiered approach. I personally believe that you can't trust a
LinkedIn connection to represent a genuine, quality connection. I am
connected to a number of people who I know personally but don't have a
strong business relationship with. I don't have a connection with anyone I
haven't had a conversation with.

In order to "shore up" my better connections, I try to leave feedback.

I imagine that while feedback from unknown sources is only somewhat
relevant, seeing feedback from someone you know and trust is very important.


If I were employing someone that knew Stephan, for example, and I saw a
positive review from him, I would most likely trust that review because I
trust Stephan.

I make new connections on the basis of having some concept about the person
I am linking to, but then seek to use the review facility to enhance the
trust shown towards particular links.

I can also imagine that if I were going for a Python job where the employer
knew, say, 5 or 6 of the people in my network, that would reflect well on
me. Certainly they could gauge my involvement in the Python world using this
heuristic.

In a lot of ways, LinkedIn is rather primitive. I would love to be able to
assign a weight to my connections to indicate a stronger relationship with
some people. This exists to some extent in the ability to describe
relationships ( e.g. I managed X, I worked with X etc)

As such, I don't see "weak" connections as poisoning the network.
Discriminating employers can manually examine potential hires and it doesn't
matter too much if someone headhunts someone I'm weakly linked to.

Making the comments personal and specific I believe helps to give valuable
information about that person.

Cheers,
-T

On 8/15/07, Stephan Deibel <sdeibel at wingware.com> wrote:
>
> Aahz wrote:
> > Actually, I just this week joined LinkedIn (baaaaaaaa!), and I've been
> > noticing that a lot of people are linking to others at the
> "acquaintance"
> > level, where my impression was that you were only supposed to link to
> > people when you know them better.  What kind of policies are people
> using
> > to decide whether to link to someone?
>
> I started with just the PSF board members and officers, 'cause it seemed
> logical and possibly useful.
>
> I've received around 15 requests and accepted them, but not actively tried
> to increase my connections.  No one that's asked was someone I didn't know
> at all, and out of 25 I have only 3 I feel are perhaps questionable --
> mainly
> people that I started to interact with, the connection was made, and then
> nothing much further happened.
>
> I suspect other people have different experiences...
>
> - Stephan
> _______________________________________________
> Advocacy mailing list
> Advocacy at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/advocacy/attachments/20070815/3eced426/attachment.htm