RE: GTK, wizards, KDE

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentstar com>]

>We are trying to put together a team of programmers that want to do
>small, but effective improvements to GNOME.
>
>(To achieve this, we want to "help" newcomers to GNOME  become
>proficient programmers, so we will be helping them with their
>programming questions, all of this will take place in the gnome-love
>mailing list at gnome.org, more details to follow when we get the whole
>thing together).

I made a suggestion/proposal (I think on the evolution list?, but I can't
find it now) about this many months back.  Aside from a method of providing
new programmers information to improve their skills, you might want to set
up a reward/feedback system.

What I envision, is the following.

1)  A to-do list that gives the following information
a) What project it is for
b) What the to-do consists of
c) Skill set needed for the item
d) Difficulty of the item
e) Time frame that the item should be completed in
f) 'Criticality' of the item to a projects survival/improvement/etc.
g) where to learn the needed skills (i.e. links to a relevant Gnome hacking,
and source code, etc.)
h) the 'Importance' of the item to the individual posting it
i) a 'Karma' rating based on c, d, e, f, and possibly h

The Karma would serve three purposes-  1) as a status symbol, i.e. if
someone has earned a great deal of Karma, then they have likely contributed
a great deal to the Gnome community.  Stats could be kept of most Karma
earned by day/week/month/year, etc. also, this allows the less 'sexy' and
under-recognized tasks (i.e. documentation, bug killing) to get the
recognition that they deserve 2) as an exchange medium - if an individual
earns karma, they can then post tasks to the to-do list and/or add karma to
a previously established to-do item 3) as a 'gifting' of appreciation

Thus for instance, say I have a programming task that I would really like
done, however my skills lie in documentation.  Then I could accomplish a
number of documentation tasks, and take the karma earned from them, and
assign them to the programming task that I desire.

This could initially be set up by 'gifting' a large chunck of karma to the
acknowledged Gnome luminaries (as well as possibly assigning a 'base' karma
to all voters in the Gnome election, or some such).  The karma can then be
further gifted and/or assignated to tasks.

Note that tasks should probably be assigned, so that duplication of effort
doesn't take place.  (Whether an individual could request an assignment
would likely be based on reliability and skill level of the individual based
on previously completed assignments.  Thus a newbie would likely not be able
to assign themselves a critical item with a short time frame requiring a
high degree of skill.)

Do you feel that this would be valuable?

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com