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

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

> On Jul 20, 2016, at 8:11 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 7/20/2016 8:08 PM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
>> If you have some good heuristics, I'd be interested. I don't think "hire an intern" is a long term solution.
> 
> Well, it gets easier when the input is an xml source, but for classic ascii source, other than obvious header-searching algorithms, no I haven't a clue.

One thing I found myself thinking about last night was the Note Well. Legally, https://www.ietf.org/about/note-well.html says that a variety of fairly unmeasurable events, such as speaking at a mike, are contributions. I understand the desire to find the substantive contributors, which include those acknowledged in, contributing to, or writing drafts; in my working group I have a number of people whose contributions I value quite a bit that AFAIK never attend a meeting, but comment on the email list. From my perspective, there are some forms of contribution that are more readily measured and some that are less so. It seems to me that the way to approach it is to figure out what can be measured and decide to what degree we think it's relevant or gives us the information we need.

Yes some of that is being rewarded for showing up, for some definition of "showing up". Our numbers are all over the map; we have 1346 in physical attendance, and 264 in remote attendance this week, Ray said last night IIRC. We have a total of 2135 posted internet drafts as of this morning, with 2746 distinct email addresses in their respective "author" sections, which is almost twice as many. 2812 people (including [e-mail], whoever that is) posted email to some [e-mail] in 2016, which might have been pages and pages or as simple as "+1", which is important when I'm measuring consensus. I have no idea how many people are acknowledged or made it into "contributor" sections, because last night I slept rather than reading 2135 internet drafts. I did think about a tool, and there may be some analytic heuristics out there. If Google is to be believed, someone once posted a corpus of tens of thousands of names...

I think we need a measurable, repeatable, way to identify contributors or participants, and to say where they are located, if we are going to try to position meetings near our contributors. Our definitions in the past have been based on internet draft authorship and physical attendance. Happy to extend that, but I need a way to do it that I can implement in a tool, that anyone can use to repeat the experiment. And absent that, I'm not sure how much pontification on what it means to be a participant or a contributor provides value.