[core-workflow] Tracker workflow proposal

[Ezio Melotti]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
> On mer., 2014-04-23 at 15:27 +0300, Ezio Melotti wrote:
>> By having badges/trophies that are not easily abused.
>> For example having "Submit 10 patches in one day" is unrealistic and
>> will likely push whoever wants to get this to either hold off his
>> patches and submit them at once or to produce 10 poor-quality patches.
>> Having "Triage 100 issues" is less prone to abusing IMHO, because even
>> if someone is doing some extra work to try to reach the goal, I don't
>> think this will affect the quality of the work.
>
> Why don't you think so?
> We actually all know how easy it is to be extremely dumb at triaging,
> since there has been a well-known example on the tracker (I won't
> mention his name out of charity, but he thought he was being very
> productive).
>

There might be exceptions, but I think most of the contributors
(especially the ones promoted to triagers) would be reasonable and
won't "cheat" just to obtain a badge.
If they do, we can just tell them and/or remove their triager
privileges (or award them the "bad triager" badge :).

> You should read this before you think awards (badges, trophies...) don't
> have any negative effects:

I am myself somewhat skeptical that badges are a good way to appeal to
more contributors (see also my link about overjustification), but, as
Nick says, if we decide to do it and we do it right, it might work.
Asking new contributors if they think this would motivate them might
also give us an idea.

> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html
>
> (well, of course, the author, Joel Spolsky, is also the co-founder of
> Stack Overflow... the other co-founder shortly explains his take on
> gamification here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-gamification/ ; as
> that article shows, he was solving a different problem than ours,
> though: namely, that web forums usually have a poor S/N ratio)
>

Thanks for the links!  The goal is indeed somewhat different, namely
appealing to new (and possibly younger) developers and having them
sticking around.  I know some core-devs that already have a
"self-imposed" goal of fixing at least N bugs per week -- badges would
propose a similar challenge to everyone and provide an easy way to
track it and a "reward" for completing it successfully.

> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>