For those of you who haven't followed the discussion, GNOME is a highly
popular open source desktop suite. GNOME development is to some extent
coordinated by the GNOME Foundation, which has employed bounties to get
certain key development tasks done.
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
This of course is of great interest with regard to our own thoughts about
doing something similar.
In order to qualify the success of the GNOME bounty system I contacted the
GNOME foundation and asked them for their opinion on whether the project
had been a success or failure, and how it affected the culture of the
GNOME development community. Their conclusions are almost entirely
positive and they want to repeat the bounty process, see attached reply by
Jonathan Blandford of Red Hat / GNOME Foundation.
Caveat lector: The system which I think should be used by the Wikimedia
Foundation is different. With GNOME's bounty system, you have potentially
the situation where two developers hack away on the same stuff, but only
one of them (who submits the code earlier) gets paid.
I think there should be an open call for tenders process, where a
technical-minded steering committee appointed or elected by the foundation
outlines certain key tasks, and the developers can name the conditions
under which they are willing to complete them (e.g. "I'll do this for free
by February next year", "I'll do this for a rate of $20/hour", "I'll do
this for $200 upon delivery of the code"). These competing tenders can
then be held up against one another, and the committee decides which one,
if any, to take up. Once they do so, there is a contract between the
Foundation and the developer, and there's no risk of competing work being
done at the same time.
In this system, those who allege that volunteer effort is good enough will
have the opportunity to prove this by negotiating voluntary agreements
over contracts with the steering committee. So payment is not given an
advantage over non-payment; both solutions are equally acceptable.
Similarly, this scheme gives both the foundation and the developers wiggle
room to settle on mutually acceptable terms, rather than giving one or the
other an advantage from the outset.
A wiki is perfect both for the negotiations and the collaborative writing
of the task specifications.
Because "bounty" carries strong connotations of competition rather than
cooperation, I would like us to stop using that word, at least when
referring to the proposal described above. Instead, it should be described
as a tender process.
Regards,
Erik
- - - - - - - -
From: Jonathan Blandford <jrb at redhat dot com>
To: Erik Moeller <moeller at scireview dot de>
Kopie: <board at gnome dot org<
Hi Erik,
Sorry for the delay in answering your questions. I'm hoping we can get
some of the administrators of the bounty system to comment, as they have
a better idea a lot of the details of the last round. I'll try to fill
in a few gaps until they reply.
As you noticed, the bounties were modest in scope, and were pretty
successful. It helped get several new hackers involved in GNOME, and
brought attention to integrating several modules. It doesn't seem to
have modified GNOME's culture in any noticeable way, and contributed to
some neat code being written. Even the bounties that weren't fully
filled had positive effects.
On the flip side, a few maintainers felt extra pressure to look at and
accept the bounty patches, which was to be expected. Also, the bounty
program was intentionally very uncontroversial and small in scope[1].
We don't really know how well an expansion of the system to a larger
scope would be like. We do plan to repeat the process soon on a similar
scale.
Thanks,
-Jonathan
[1] compared to the size of the rest of the project.
Hello,
I have updated the categories in LanguageRO.php in CVS. Can someone
please update it on the server? We'd like to start using categories, and
we'd prefer the localized keyword instead of the English one -- I expect
changing the namespace name will result in the desired behaviour, is
this correct? (i.e. we could write [[Categorie:foo]] instead of
[[Category:foo]] once the namespace was changed from "Category" to
"Categorie").
If this is the wrong list to address to, I would appreciate it if you
could direct me to the proper forum for this request.
Thank you,
Gutza
Hello,
I was wondering what MySQL graphical interfaces most
of you prefer to easily manipulate data from the
database. I have tried MySQL Control Center and
Navicat but they are just not that great. They have
some qualities in some aspects but also some
disadvantages in others. I am not sure if this is a
bug or just the GUI�s fault but I can never cancel a
SQL query without having to end the process of the
whole program.
Does anyone have any recommendations of what would be
the best MySQL GUI?
Thanks,
Claudio
______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
Hello,
There is a bad bug currently with templates :
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=411192&aid=965725&group_id…
Basicly, we use | as a delimiter between parameters which prevent user
to rename links ( [[foo|blabla]] ) :
{{template|para1=[[foo|bla]]|para2=oooo}}
Wich will not be parsed correctly.
In the bug report, a proposal is to use |CR instead :
{{template
para1=[[bla|something]]|
para2=ooo|
}}
The parser will then be much easier and the |CR doesn't conflict with
anything.
The fix in the code seems trivial but users will have to fix the already
existing templates (but he we are still in beta).
--
Ashar Voultoiz
Hello Wikimedia devlopers:
I was looking for a way to add a new custom tag to wikimedia.
I found a second of code that looked promising:
# Create an HTML-style tag, e.g. <yourtag>special text</yourtag>
# Callback will be called with the text within
# Transform and return the text within
function setHook( $tag, $callback ) {
$oldVal = @$this->mTagHooks[$tag];
$this->mTagHooks[$tag] = $callback;
return $oldVal;
}
Unfortunately setHook isn't used anywhere so I have no example
to work with and I don't know where the best place to insert the
hook from. Anyone have any hints I could use?
Thanks
-John
Greets all. Id like to begin contributing, in a technical fashion to
wikipedia, and this seems like the place to start.
At heart, Im a sysadmin, but to start out (especially in isolation), the
best way seems programming work on mediawiki. Be it squashing bugs, or
implementing new features, Id like to help. Unfortunately, while Ive
contributed some content, Im not overtly involved in wikipedia: thus I
dont know if on Sourceforge bugs are really bugs, and RFE are wanted by
more then one person - I don't want to waste anyones time by working on
things that wouldnt be accepted. Thus, I ask: what would be some tasks
that I could cut my teeth on?
If you or another reader on this board would want do some programming on an
interesting standalone job, there has been a discussion on another WikiMedia
board: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-July/date.html,
about the fundraising page, see http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
I give a excerpt of the discusson below. If anyone with relevant experience
is interested, I suggest to contact Daniel Meyer, e.g. at maveric149 at
yahoo.com (who is primarily responsible for WikiMedia finances)
Erik Zachte
> Why not having a dynamic picture looking like:
>
> WikiPediaThon
>
> 0$ 30k$ 100K$
> [OOOOoooooo......................]
>
> Where:
> O is provision
> o achieved
> . still needed
Daniel Mayer:
"Because there is currently no easy way to update such a bar and no way at
all to have those updates in real time. We also need to figure out where the
goal line should be set (hint to board: we need an approved budget).
But that would be an awesome thing to have, yes.
We might want to consider putting a bounty on creating a bot that could do
that. The person creating it would have to be *very* trusted and their bot
code vetted for security purposes (since it would be using account names and
passwords to gather data). But I think it could be done."
----
Erik Zachte (paraphrased):
I would like to consider whether a volunteer might not be interested to do
this useful and interesting job. Bountry should be last resort.
----
Daniel again:
"I simply want results and I want them fast. Creating a process by which
donors get near instant feedback that their donation was counted and helped
push us toward a goal will generate many times the money any bounty would
cost.
I'm also not at all keen on trying to attempt to do this in anything but an
automated way (esp since it would be *me* that would be attempting to be a
bot)."
---
Erik:
in reaction on
"The person creating it would have to be *very* trusted and their bot code
vetted for security purposes."
I wonder, many developers write applications which will need to run in a
secured environment, so much so that they don't get access to the live
version themselves. They test it on a fake account. Standard practice. Yes,
an audit would be wise.
1. Wikipedie:Co je článek
> The page seems to have been deleted successfully by now.
No. You can look
http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Speci%C3%A1ln%C3%AD:Allpages&fro…
It is still there. Even I am sysop, I cannot delete it. In the short
pages it used to have no zero size (I cannot to check it now). In my view
the problem is bad namespace.
2. Book sources
I still don't understand how to change it in Czech wiki without changing
LanguageCs.php.
Vít Zvánovec