At least I never thought. IMHO everyone who votes has something in mind about the guys contributions (which is something you may call popularity), well, yes. Philip had some suggestion to make this more objective, and some derivative of this idea also appears in your list below: to ask a 'phpdoc resume' from candidates.
Ways of seeing and learning things beyond the day-to-day commit emails, yes, I like the idea.
But:
If, for example, there was an annual vote on an "employee of the year", most employees I know would suddenly become much more attentive to their work, and try to impress the voters. ;-)
Well, this is not a bad idea. But how would it look on the credits page? Maybe it would be better to have this stuff more often then one year? ;)
OK. Can you afford to contribute time to code such a system (set of filters and stuff)?
To compare lines and changed characters? Yes, I have written much of this code already. To compare the *value* of the changes? No. :-)
Well, the latter would need artifical intelligence probably ;)
Or human intelligence.... to discern the value of a one-character commit.
That would mean too much human intelligence. It is certainly not the way to go to place the whole listing to someones hand, who only monitors commits. This would be the only way to go if we would require all voters to watch for commit messages. A whole lot of time can be spent on looking all the messages... Philip's idea on a summarized view of all this from the nominees perspective sounds good to solve this problem IMHO.
So, the few "amazing one line commits" rely on human intelligence, and yet, humans rarely read them. It might be a problem, it might not be.
Well, speaking only about one line comments is a bit too polarizating what we are talking about. A long commit can mean less work (ie. copied literally from a user comment), then an equal long commit (example added for a new function, which is only available in CVS and the committer digged up the parameters and their meaning / effect, and then came up with an example). These also represent different contribution roles, but this also cannot be determined by charcounts.
How can you 'stimulate keeping a position of credit' while you enforce 10 members to go away every year, just because this is the rule?
If the want the credit, they *must* keep contributing, more than others. Trust me, the manual isn't exactly laden with people over-contributing.
Yes, what I see know is quite against the fact many guys advocate. That 'PHP has one of the best documentations ever written'. Well, this is quite different seen from inside then from outside probably, but I have many things that I dislike in the manual. And we surely need contributors to help. But I don't think that being on an alphbetical or computer ordered raw list gives any respect.
If you have the top 20 listed the first year [let's say that this is measured by some meaningful way, not changed chars, so Hartmut won't be #1 forever ;)], do you think that will change that much after a year? Well, maybe we had a quite different group a year before, but key figures were much the same as today.
I guess I don't see it that way, because I've been inactive for so long. :-) My "top five" authors and editors has changed little, the top 20 changes almost monthly. Example: Sometime Jesus works on notes, sometimes he hits docs. Sometimes Damien changes hundreds of US pages, other times he........ has a life? :-)
Yes. I surely miss 'a life' sometimes ;) I cannot really imagine now how much that would take (still given that we will go on the human edited waz) for humans to revise the top 20 listing. I think it would be better to decide this when we come to that 'one year after the first updated listing' and then we will decide. We surely need to point out that there is a possibility that things will change in the 'authors' category too (which is what I consider the top listing).
...So what if we employ Philip's idea of a 'phpdoc resume' which would some up all the stuff done by someone? Then voters would have a short summarized list of what someone done (from his perspective), and why he thinks he deserves getting on the list.
Sounds good to me.
Great. ;)
It was an idea to make sure voting wasn't based on pressure. In the US, who we vote for, as individuals, is sealed. What those people vote for is not sealed. I would say that this wasn't a big deal if there were 10 people.... but there seem to be much more.
Well as I said, I don't have any hard numbers in mind. I don't think there will be 'too many', but there will be 'more than ten' probably. Anyway, we can restrict voting to some core members, but then we would probably get back to the possibility of which you wuold like to avoid, the 'goo old boys network' :) Note that I don't think so that such friend nominates friend thing will happen, but to calm down the tempers, I don't have any problem with anonymous voting, which many members voting, but only with proper authentication of course.
6. A majority of the voters should be allowed to disqualify any other person from voting.
You proposed a system (IIRC) where *any* voting member could cancel a vote, or candidate. To prevent turf wars, it made more sense to me that *half* (or more) of the whole group would have to agree.
I thought 'disqualify' means 'disqualify forever' here, but I now see that it does not. Seems much better this way ;) And granted, it's better then my suggestion.
ROTFL.... what make/model? :-)
Nothing expensive. I need a stable and modern one, but I have no big budget for this. There are some 900-1000$+VAT modoles in Hungary, which seem to be ok. The very low cost models here are Gericom (from Austria) and Portocom (Hungarian brand, assembled with parts from Taiwan :).
Cheap stuff, my business is doing good. Is there a good money-transfer system to there?
Heh, there probably is ;) Should I treat this seriosly?? Unbelievable...
I've pulled in well over $100K on just PHP work. If I can't give back in doc work, or code work, because I'm too busy, the *least* I can do is make sure the people working on it have decent hardware. Hardware is cheap, human time is not.
Well, it took some hard time for me to think this over. My reaction was at first a marvellous YES, and then I got on the idea of all the others here who are not this directly credited. Many things rolled through my mind, and finally I came to the decision to accept this offer, and try not to make a matter for delusion (basically to work in the future here as I have done before). I thought about something personal to thank you this offer, ie. naming the new laptop sytem after you :)) But I have a tradition to give my installations female names, so this won't match. :) What I can also promise, is that I am not going to strengthen your points on the list if they are not acceptable for me (ie. 'no buy a beer on a conference effect', which you were opposing :). From now on we should move this part into private space.
Goba