Re: foundation application..

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

> >
> >
> > > [...]
> > > It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the
> > > hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution
> > will
> > > address that problem in a representative way.
> >
> > Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here.
>
> I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant
> data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be
> taken forward, as far as I am concerned.

What is the relevant data that is not already public?

The list of interns is interns is public, the same as the period of
internships, commit logs, bug reports, mailing list discussions.

People who stayed involved should have activity after their internship
finished it.

Looking at that alone would bias the result. Off the top of my head, these data would need to be compared to the data of sponsored/paid employees contributing to GNOME since 2005 and that data assessed against how foundation applications have been handled each year and member engagement post acceptance/rejection of foundation memberships too. Taking all the associated errors into account and doing this should help give a fairly comprehensive overview of the situation and help us determine whether our assumptions on perceived differences between the motivations of those who are paid for shorter period of time than those who are paid for longer periods of time, are justified.

At the moment we have no reason to assume that all volunteers and sponsored contributors alike will have a 100% commitment rate and there is certainly no reason to assume that any paid contributor is any more likely than any other paid contributor to stay committed to GNOME contributing once there is no financial incentive to do that, without evidence to support that theory.

In other words, an early objective would be to determine whether interns are more likely to lose interest than other kinds of contributors when they are no longer being offered a financial incentive by comparing contribution behaviours between interns and other kinds of contributors.

Magdalen