Re: [Mtgvenue] Exploration of a "posting" metric - draft-elkins-mtgvenue-participation-metrics

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 7/20/2016 11:37 AM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
> In your draft and in your talk, you mention the possibility of measuring a person's participation or contribution in terms of email postings. You also mention a number of other possible models, such as whether their name winds up be "acknowledged" or listed as a "contributor" in a draft or RFC.
>
> I took a crack at extracting information about email postings from the mail archive.
...
> The point of that was to identify low-hanging fruit.


The problem is that quite a lot of that fruit is underdeveloped, or rotten.

The S/N ration for postings is sufficiently poor as to render measuring 
posting possibly only slightly better than the 'just showing up' metric 
of registering for a meeting.  Simply put, just counting whether a 
person posts to the lists tells us nothing about whether they've 
actually "contributed" to the substance of the work.

"Contribution" needs to be measured meaningfully, as well as 
objectively, even if the measurement is coarse and doesn't count everyone.

This is why I've suggested reaching no deeper than the Acknowledgements 
and Contributors sections of I-D's and RFCs (as well as author lists, of 
course.)  If a name shows up there, the person made it through a basic 
filter for having been seen to actually contribute.


d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net