Dori wrote: Aw, come on now. That's not really a problem. We can certainly give Jimbo and/or the Board of Trustees the additional power to assign up to 25% of unassigned donated money to development task. The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be. I think you didn't understand this part. There is no agreement or consensus required. Everyone specifies percentages of their own (in some sort of designated user interface; they're kept secret). At the end of the month, they are averaged out. Example: * I say: Alice has done 5% of feature X, Bob has done 10%, Charlie has done 85%. * You say: Alice has done 15% of feature X, Bob has done 15%, Charlie has done 70%. * Jimbo says: Alice has done 10% of feature X, Bob has done 26%, Charlie has done 64%. Then the end-result will be: Alice - 10%, Bob - 17%, Charlie - 73%. Of course, the averaging could optionally be weighted by the amount of money the voters received in the previous month. I don't think that will be a problem. Such blatantly un-co-operative people can easily be penalised with very low percentages. People will know they will get more money if they use their common sense to behave within proper forms of etiquette. Timwi

Elisabeth Bauer wrote: Elian is absolutely correct. I just had a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports Ihmo, that is just as a village pump; it might be nice to sweep the floor sometimes :-) On top of estimates listed by Elian, I would add estimate of "how long could it take to be developped". ant

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 02:51:19 +0100, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote: I don't know that we could. It might piss off some donors if we said we'll use this for hardware, and we end up using it for software features. Although we do have some money that wasn't donated, and we could certainly advertise that doners could donate toward a specific feature/bug. However, that's not what I was talking about. I simply thought that the process had too many rules to be properly understood and to work well. Yes, I did misunderstand that. I still don't see it as a fair method though. Averages could give some screwey results which might leave people who made more work, receive less compensation. It's not necessarily blatant. It could even be inadvertant, or it could be as simple as if I am going to do this part I might as well do that part or I would prefer that part to work like I plan it. Coding is much harder to do collaboratively than editing (unless we're talking about unrelated parts). -- [[en:User:Dori]]

Dori wrote: We shouldn't be saying we'll be using the money for anything particular. That just ties our hands. "Too many rules"? Are you saying it's too complicated and you don't understand how it's supposed to work? It's not complicated at all; as I said, the LiveJournal Bazaar worked similar to this, and developers there were perfectly happy with it and understood how it worked. If you have any specific questions about the system, feel free to ask. Please don't dismiss it solely on the grounds that you don't understand it; if you have any specific criticism that you think makes the system unsuitable, I will happily accept that. Otherwise, I would really like to give this a try, at least for a few month until we can definitely say that it doesn't work well. I'll do all the necessary coding for the voting interface, the averaging, etc. It is perfectly fair. Think about it. Who did "more" or "less" work is completely subjective. Everyone has their own perception of what percentage of the work was done by certain people. By averaging out the percentages, we create some sort of "collective subjective judgment", and everybody's own judgment will be part of it. If you're afraid that people might cheat the system by giving ridiculous percentages, this isn't a problem either. Firstly, only people who have actually done development in the last month, and the Board of Trustees perhaps, have voting power. You won't get much voting power if you're not a responsible individual. Hence, when averaging stuff, the "irresponsible percentages" will be given much less weight. Additionally, of course, you shouldn't be able to vote for yourself. :) A bug or feature should be assigned to a particular developer (this is a core feature of BugZilla, which I'm still hoping we will switch to in the long run). It will be easy to enforce a policy that only the current assignee of the bug may work on it. (I admit that the fact that this worked in LiveJournal is no surprise because nobody has CVS access there and people only submit patches to BugZilla. But even on Wikipedia, I suppose CVS access should be given only to responsible developers who will follow this rule.) Any more questions? ;-) Timwi