Open Stack

On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 09:04 -0400, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 04/05/2013 07:43 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 11:03 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> <snip>
> >> Bruce Schneier puts it in better words than I do in "Liars and Outliers":
> >>
> >> "When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that
> >> measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of
> >> doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place."
> >
> > Agree with everything you say. I don't think I've seen obvious examples
> > of people trying to game the stats but, with the emphasis we're putting
> > on these stats, it's only natural that people will start gaming them.
> 
> I think we've been reasonably lucky so far, so if there are any folks 
> gaming it, they are drowned out by the vast amount of legitimate work 
> being done.
> 
> In an era of readily available data, it's kind of hard to prevent people 
> from making graphs out of it. And with a project that gets so much 
> press, it's hard to keep people from making ridiculous press releases.
> 
> Mark, I'm more comfortable when someone like yourself is maintaining the 
> code base that everyone seems to be using to generate stats, because I 
> know he's not going to game this output. If you are stepping away from 
> the repo, it might be worth putting it into openstack-dev and gerrit, so 
> at least people can push reviews to deal with org changes.

I'm fine with that, it's really that I don't have enough interest to
deal with pull requests like this:

https://github.com/markmc/openstack-gitdm/pull/12

But then again, the Foundation membership database is probably a more
reliable source of affiliation information at this point that my
trolling LinkedIn :)

> I don't know that putting the cat back in the bag is going to happen no 
> matter what we do.

We were keeping it somewhat under control by only publish stats at
release time. I'm really quite concerned about publishing ongoing stats.
Maybe people will just get bored of them eventually, though.

Cheers,
Mark.