Submitted by Ceki Gulcu (not verified) on Wed, 2009-03-25 13:34.
> There is at Apache, as in every human community an implicit
> non-written classification of people according to their actual
> activity, personality and achievements, that will lead some people's
> opinion to be more important than other's even if they have the same
> formal position in the organization.
As long as those implicit non-written classification is aligned with the magnitude of contributions, the organization will be run as a meritocracy. However, bringing in other factors such as personality introduces a new dimension which might or might not be meritocratic, but admittedly I am merely nitpicking.
> Now what I think is not good is to start for formally rank individuals
> in a volunteer organization. One award for one person isn't that
> harmful, as arbitrary as it could be, but imagine if we wanted to
> start defining a "merit scale" for all people. This would very likely
> lead the entire organization to blow up.
Indeed, it is a difficult problem. Any metric for ranking contributions would be an earthshaking change, with the potential to destabilize the ASF. In a recent blog entry [1], I asked if one could imagine such a ranking mechanism.
As most metrics, any formal ranking metric could have unintended and
perverse results.
> There is at Apache, as in every human community an implicit
> non-written classification of people according to their actual
> activity, personality and achievements, that will lead some people's
> opinion to be more important than other's even if they have the same
> formal position in the organization.
As long as those implicit non-written classification is aligned with the magnitude of contributions, the organization will be run as a meritocracy. However, bringing in other factors such as personality introduces a new dimension which might or might not be meritocratic, but admittedly I am merely nitpicking.
> Now what I think is not good is to start for formally rank individuals
> in a volunteer organization. One award for one person isn't that
> harmful, as arbitrary as it could be, but imagine if we wanted to
> start defining a "merit scale" for all people. This would very likely
> lead the entire organization to blow up.
Indeed, it is a difficult problem. Any metric for ranking contributions would be an earthshaking change, with the potential to destabilize the ASF. In a recent blog entry [1], I asked if one could imagine such a ranking mechanism.
As most metrics, any formal ranking metric could have unintended and
perverse results.
[1] http://ceki.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-apache-meritocracy.html