It says sorry no bounties, but do bounties have to mean cash or a tshirt?

[Sean Plaice <splaice gmail com>]

Hello Everyone,
Bounties are great, but raising the cash for them is not simple, nor
even an ample supply of tshirts is simple. I think that while cash is
king, and a tshirt is great there is is still an ample amount of one
thing the GNOME community can dole out at no cost. Street-cred...

So what is this street-cred you speak of? Simply, it is the
recognition from other hackers of a contributors skills, or work, or
effort. Instead of paying out cash you give people an easy way to see
their accomplishments, share their accomplishments, and boast about
them.

The google bounties is a great example of how to present such
bounties, but there is no reason you have to stop at just the ones
listed for cash incentives.

My idea is this, create a site that provides a large aggregation of
bugs and fixes, improvements and features wanted. These can be
supplied by project owners, or other maintainers of a project to a
central free bounty site. The bounty issuer provides a ranking of the
feature or fix, say one to five, or one to ten stars for the person
that accomplishes the bounty. Upon patch submit, and approval by the
submitter of the bounty the person is rewarded the stars of the
bounty.

Each person full filling these bounties will be able to view their
personalized bounty page and view their acquired stars, and ranking
amongst other fringe submitters. (I say fringe because a system like
this is to initially attract people that are not already dedicated to
a project, though this is not exclusive). There would have to baseline
rules such as bounty completer should not be a maintainer of the
project of the bounty they full fill. This is to prevent stacking of
ranking and results which would drive off potential bounty full
fillers. If a bounty is full filled by a regular project maintainer it
the bounty is voided, and removed, or marked as being completed
internally.

The site would provide aggregate stats on features of the bounties,
which project has the most outstanding bounties, which project has the
most highly ranked bounties, who has completed the most bounties, who
has the most bounty points or stars acquired. The personal stats
should be easily exported for the bounty full filler to show on their
website as a mark of fame, and skill, or even scrutinized by a third
party (think resume reference, think "I solved X problem for Miguel De
Icaza in project X" on a resume).

Another feature that could be incorporated, would be the weighting of
projects based on their impact to the core of gnomes success. Projects
that are more important then others maintain a higher weight then
those of minimal importance. Performance improvements to a core
library is worth more then a translation or creative for a project.
This is complex but I think other people that know more about what is
important to GNOMES real success could elaborate better on what they
think is REALLY needed. This weight would be used to factor the total
points rankings of submitters.

Not to get to lengthy but another thing that would be important to the
bounty page is a classification of difficulty beyond the bounty reward
stars. This would be such as "novice" "expert" "master of the GNOME
universe" or other such things. There are people of all experience
levels that are going to be interested in contributing, so it should
be simple for people to find the tasks that are suited for them. I am
sure no one cares if a 13 year old just starting out development,
translations, documentation, etc is contributing vs. some wise elder
that knows all and can do all. Just as long as the work gets done is
what is important, so finding the right work for the right people is
essential.

I think that is about it for my ideas at this point, never under
estimate the power of fame and street cred that can be handed out by
the GNOME community. If people are willing to work as hard as they do
to have an extensive friendster list they will do the same for
something that might actually mean something, such as making GNOME
better. Even better is letting people know they made something better.

Then again it is past my bed time, I might be spouting gibberish at this point!

-- 
Sean