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

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, Sean!

Thanks for your answer. I apologize to other readers of the list! This
will be a long reply.

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:04:02 -0700
Sean Plaice <splaice gmail com> wrote:

> I think consideration of an alternative to the bugzilla votes should
> be considered. Bug and bounties are not necessarily the same thing,
> and while bugzilla is a good bug tracking system it will bring the
> burden of trying to work around making a bounty a bug.

AFAIK, developers use bugzilla as a task tracking program, already. You
don't just enter bugs but also feature enhencement wishes. I don't see
any theorethical reason not to start a 'project' for, say, gnome art
work, or marketing material, or project web pages.

> [...] I think best way to
> draw people in would be to present the bounties almost as a work
> order. A project maintainer creates a bounty, that could be for
> anything, fix a bug, produce a creative, anything that is "needed". I
> would stress that a project maintainer be the only person to create a
> bounty (unlike a bug in bugzilla which can be posted by anyone). 

Of course, maintainers are able to estimate the importance of task
fixes from a technical point of view, but not from a market or user's
point of view. In fact, nobody is! That's the point of the price system:
Getting signals how resources should be allocated.

In the pint economy everybody is able to signal their wishes (expressed
in pints) and thus establishes potential signals for others (expressed
in aggregated pints). If only maintainers would be able to create pint
bounties, you basically fail to get these positive feedback.

Sorting tasks (or bugs) according to aggregated amount of pints may
establish a 'work order' for those that like to care about these
signals.

And in contrast to votes, no user can really get the idea that
something has to be done! If it wasn't done yet, well, there obviously
wasn't enought pints offered yet for somebody to do it.

This also circumvents one of the main problems of the bounty system.
Right now there's just one 'buyer' and this signals the wishes of a
very rich entinity. Why shouldn't our contributors be able to mention
their wishes, and let pints signal the importance of these?


> [...]
>
> That being said we also don't want to have a huge list of bounties
> like bugs in bugzilla, information overload will scare off potential
> contributor's. So for example a maintainer might say "Damn there are
> these 10 simple bugs in bugzilla in stable branch that should be
> addressed, but I need to keep working on X feature for in the
> development branch, I need someone to get these guys done". 

I'm not used to bugzilla but a few days ago, I checked the gnome-love
keyword report. The list is basically the same to your example. It was
indeed hard to grasp, but IMHO, this is a CSS and layout problem.

For example, people are able to browse the very huge list that ebay
offers. Linuxquestions.org has 50.000 members, and lots of discussions,
and people do have no problem talking part. Some are even smart enought
to use the search engine!

Aggregated pints would extend bugzilla by exactly one column. It doesn't
lead to any more information overload. In fact, it reduces it: You just
sort by aggregated pints, and pick the first one you believe you'd like
to add pints to, or the one you think you could fix or implement.


> [...]
>
> Another reason to do this outside of bugzilla (though you might be
> able to do this in bugzilla i am no expert with it), is so that people
> can create teams. 

A user account is open to individuals but theoretically also to teams or
institutions. I see no real problem to let RedHat or Ubuntu have a user
account to collect pints, or the "Westminster Abby College Bug Hunting
Students Club". ;)

However, teams usually have problems deciding how to spend a resource
like pints. If we'd really like such teams, we should add a tag to user
acounts, and sum each individuals pints for a statistic, with t-shirts
for the winning teams at GUADEC. Could be fun! :)

> [...]
>
> I agree, though I think this system would be less apropo for managing
> contributors but more as a hook to draw in contributors, and to raise
> attention to needed contributions. 

The system is perfect for managing contributors, because contributors
manage themselves. Right now, buzilla is a list without any information
about importance of fixes, or (short time) rewards for doing so. One may
get recognition after a lot of fixes for a single project. But do you
know who translated a certain project into Chinese, for example?
Probably not.

So if the translator enters a bug or task for another project, is there
anybody to recognise him? Probably not. Thus, our translator is
demotivated because his contributions are not valued. Unlike developers,
he can't even use his own work because he is fluent in English.

With pints, he can earn them by translating a project and spend them to
whatever he finds important. Another contributor may not know that guy
but he fixes the bug and gets the pints to spend them elsewehere. And
our translator is happy.

That's the advantage of an 'economy': Its resources gets managed by
itself through (price) signals. There's no need to care about it.
There's no need to know who did what. It just works (in most cases).


> The more I think about it though we
> might not want to limit the bounties to just virtual 'pints'. The
> creation of a system were people can donate micro payments, or other
> things of value towards a bounty would be good.

Ehm, the idea of the pint economy is to prevent this exactly! :)

First, for backing the system up with real money, you don't need micro
payments in bugzilla (or wherever); you just need a currency market
with exchage rates. Say, 5 pints for a dollar and 3 pints for an euro,
and visa versa. So, if you'd like to spend 1.000 dollars on tasks or
bugfixes, you could buy pints from the GNOME foundation. Likewise, you
can sell your earned pints to the GNOME foundation to get real money.
Exchange rates are determined as in every other market: by supply and
demand (for pints).

However, second, you don't want that! It introduces the real problems of
an economy into the system: Some people have lots real money to buy
pints and are thus able to influence direction. A lot of people consider
this a bad thing.

Additionally, you need extra care about the technical requirements
because some people might be very angry if you'd loose their (real
value) pints by a server crash.

Another problem: You still need maintainers for setting the main
direction of a project, and they must be able to say 'No!". Now figure,
Ubunutu would spend 100.000 pints on getting spacial nautilus 'fixed'.
Obviously, maintainers would say no. Imaging the problems!

This doesn't happen with (just-for-fun) pints: Maintainers may just tag
the task as WONT-FIX, and ubuntu can move their pints to other tasks,
donate them to others, or just forget them.

The next problem: Governments are very strict on people producing money
because the amount available within an economy determines inflation and
other things. So, a pint-to-real-money market might introduce legal
problems in the future.

The most important problem: It's well known that extrinsic motivation
(such as real money) crowds out intrinsical motivation (the 'just for
fun' effect). A pint economy is still just for fun, first because of the
naming, and second because you can't do something useful with pints
outsite of its own world.

Tagging pints with a real value, however, will lead to an increase of
contributors that only care about the money. If, one day, the money
decreases, contributors will switch to somewhere else, and just-for-fun
people might have left the project meanwhile.

> [...]
>
> I think I went on sort of a tangent for following up to a reply,
> either way it flowed from me so I figured I would run with it.

Was a pleasure to read somebody else's thoughts on this. Thanks!

Cheers,
Claus