So it is with divvying out the Friends of Eclipse funds. Scott suggests we give up. Just kidding; I'm distorting his words by taking them out of context. What's life without a bit of humor? He actually suggests we give up centralized control. Fortunately he doesn't mean we should have a vote each and every time. We all know how contentious voting can be and how easily one can stack the vote with all your best friends. It's more likely to resemble a popularity contest than anything else.
Concretely, in 339239, Scott suggests that the individuals donating the money should make the decision. I'm not completely sure what this would entail. I think the suggestion is that the donor delegates the spending decision to a specific project's leadership, sort of like ear marking it, perhaps via a huge drop-down list of all projects. That certainly sounds very fair, at least to the donor.
Let's consider though just for a moment if donor earmarking is likely to be fair in the grand scheme of things. I hope the Aardvark project, being early in the list of choices, doesn't get most of the donations! I hope projects with poor documentation, builds, and testing get some money to help fix that. I hope projects that are used in the many other projects, but aren't apparent in the user interface, get lots of donations. In fact, I hope it's not just a few sexy projects that get the lion's share of the money. Simply put, I hope the donors will be fair. I doubt it though. I fear it will just be a case of the rich getting richer. Personally, I'd rather have people I trust to do what's fair making the decisions.
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13 comments:
It would be nice to apply 'tags' to donations...
$50 #EMF #JGIT #Tools
...this needn't imply a particular split between projects, just a relative 'weight' to the tags.
Folks could compare unweighted graphs to the weighted, apply multipliers for commiters, check new vs. consistant donors, etc.
If nothing else it would make for some interesting visuals (and probably encourage donations).
That's a good point! We could allow multiple choices to gather useful statistics that would help take into account the usage patterns and desires of the donors.
It would be nice to apply 'tags' to donations...
$50 #EMF #JGIT #Tools
...this needn't imply a particular split between projects, just a relative 'weight' to the tags.
This is indeed a good idea. Why not add it as comment/suggestion to bug 339239 as this is a great example of how things could be made less likely to be a popularity contest as Ed fears.
Ed,
As I interpret this blog posting, it seems to conflate the notion of 'the world is unfair' (which is obviously true), with 'any non-centralized process to make choices' is unfair. Yes the 'world' is unfair (by most people's interpretation of fair). But that doesn't mean that every non-centralized choice process is unfair...or that others (group) choices are unfair.
Ed,
One clarification...in my blog posting, I didn't suggest that to be fair we just give up, but rather we give up control.
Scott,
My thesis is that, because fairness is subjective, any process for achieving it will be perceived as fair by some and unfair by others. Different processes will be unfair in different ways. No one process will be absolutely fair, because there is no absolute standard by which to measure it. Only when one person is making the choices and that one person is the only one assessing its fairness is absolute fairness ensured.
Of course we can't just give up. We just need to keep in mind that we'll judge the fairness of the process by the fairness of the results and that someone will always argue that the process needs to be changed because they don't like the outcome it's producing. A different process will then produce a different outcome, maybe, but then another person won't like that.
In other words, we can approach fairness but we can't absolutely achieve it. It's almost like the uncertainty principle and we call it politics. It will entertain us until the universe ends.
'It's almost like the uncertainty principle and we call it politics. It will entertain us until the universe ends.'
An EclipseCon T-shirt is born :)
Ed,
I agree with your entire first paragraph of your comment...i.e. 'My thesis...'. That's also what I meant in my blog posting when I say '...because there is probably permanent disagreement about what is fair'.
But your second and third paragraphs seem to be saying that we really *can't* be fair (because everyone will judge different things as 'fair' or not)...so it's not even important to try to define a process that's more likely to produce a fair outcome (judged by the community as a whole rather than any one individual). If I'm interpreting you correctly, I don't agree with this. That is, I can easily argue that de-centralized decision making process are just better at producing a collectively fair result (as opposed to centralized/individual decisions). There's good evidence for the correctness of this assertion, btw...in the judgment and decision-making literature (in a former life I was a researcher in that domain)...so this isn't just my opinion (although it obviously is my opinion also).
Scott,
No, when I said "we can't just give up," I really did mean it behooves us to keep trying. Just because you can't reach perfection doesn't mean you should give up striving for it.
I'm no expert in decision making theory. I can well imagine that one individual making decisions is far more likely to consider fewer important factors than would a group of individuals. Hence the boarder the group, the more things considered. I can also imagine how easily a large majority of individuals could quite easily run roughshod over a sizable minority with complete disregard to fairness. Look around our planet today and back on our dark history.
Of course a long discussion of this type of issue will delve into what's the best form of democracy, with the well-founded assumption that democracy is the best form of governance. All the democracies I know of rely on some form of delegation to some type of fair representation. What good working examples have we of alternatives to this?
The problem with centralized control is that when it grows too large, it gets just as blind to need and merit as the universe ;-)
The tagging is an excellent idea.
In addition. let's only put tags in for projects that have actually applied for a little extra support. And let's make the committer reps responsible for filtering out requests for eggs and spam.
Wim,
So your refinement is to prioritize need ahead of merit and to apply an "ask and ye shall receive" filter to limit the donor choices in a way that's more likely to produce the result you'd prefer to see. Should any project that asks to be in the list be allowed, or should we say no to some because they're just not needy enough?
I'd leave the tags completely free-form, with no canned choices or constraints. A tag for #tools denotes a usage paradigm as much as a particular set of projects.
This is just an extra channel to help intelligent people make quality decisions that benefit the Eclipse ecosystem. It is specifically Not a way to micro-manage the leadership.
Go ahead and include an optional url field though (I like the name/url identity option).
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