Tracking Contributions: Contributors share their contributions periodically.

[StevenDufresne]

I want to present an alternative approach for tracking contributions by companies & individuals participating in this initiative. I briefly introduced this idea in the proposal thread. I have opened this ticket as an opportunity to more accurately describe the idea and have a dedicated place for conversation.

Before continuing, it would be helpful to read https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/169.

Lastly, my initial idea was to have each pledge group be represented by a "manager" but I think the overhead would be too much for companies who have a lot of pledges and I wouldn't want to put barriers in front of companies who are thinking about adding more contributors.

Challenges

Not all contributions are trackable As mentioned in #169, people contribute in ways that are either not tracked yet, or exist outside of code flows.

Tracking code is future tech debt Regardless of how we implement tracking code, in the future, it is bound to change and will put this project and its goal at risk. For example, what happens if we don't use slack anymore? What happens if Trac is replaced with X?

Companies have dedicated pledge pages, but their contributions are mostly invisible to non-community members As a yet-to-pledge contributor or individual, I should be able to see how these companies are contributing. Unless you are active within the contribution channels, you would have no idea what these contributors are doing. This isn't a marketing experiment for pledges. Understood. But we want to encourage new pledges to participate and it should be clear that contributing is mutually beneficial. Here is our company... Look at what we are doing for WordPress and Open source...

Hypothesis

If each participating contributor submitted a low-tech questionnaire every month about what they have accomplished, we would be able to easily identify active contributions and celebrate said contributions in public.

Related

This incorporates some ideas brought up in Andrea's suggested iteration post which extends on ideas in the original proposal. However, the main difference is that we don't try to track everything behind the scenes via code. We ask contributors to "check in".

How could this look?

• At the end of the month, send a link to a questionnaire to contributor
  • No response month 1? That's okay we all get busy.
  • No response month 2? Hmm, still participating?
  • No response month 3? Reduce visibility of contributor until response is received, send an email encouraging them to come back!
• Contributor responses are grouped and sent to team reps for light verification
• Contributions are added to contributor profile page
• Pledge pages feature (https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/{pledge}) "This Month" section of contributions pulled from profiles.

Maybe do:

• Post contributions grouped by pledge group to props channel?

If there are no responses from any of the contributors...

• Month 1: Letter to contributors, "Hey ya'll have a second to fill in the questionnaire...?
• Month 2: "It's important that contributors let us know about your contributions!" -> Reduce company visibility until response is received

What about misuse/misrepresentation?

I think making statements public and having teams reps peruse the responses is enough to maintain integrity. We could still use automation to help team reps verify the pledge information but this could be seen as supplementary and if information is missing or we changed infrastructure, the process would still be intact.

Example Questionnaire:

Congratulations on another month of contributions! In order to celebrate your contributions and add them to your pledge page, please take a few minutes to fill out this form. It's important that you fill it in because we use it to make sure our pledge page contains active contributors.

Name: <input />

Where did you participate (team, slack channel, tickets)? <input />

What have you done? <textarea />

[iandunn]

There's definitely some things I like about this idea. The review from team reps would be more accurate, and it gives contributors a chance to reflect on their impact, and share that with the community.

No matter which approach we take to solve spam/dormant pledges, I think tracking non-code contributions is long overdue. It's not fair that developers get props on their profiles but translators, designers, etc don't.

If we do track those, then the fundamental difference between this and #169 seems to be manual reporting/review vs automation. I still lean towards automation, because I worry about how consistently folks will do the extra "paperwork" on top of their existing commitments. I also worry about putting team reps in the position of being the "bad guy" who has to remove a company.

I can see it as a cool optional/unreviewed feature on top of #169, though. That could be an extra way to engage contributors and let them share a personal summary of their work w/ the community.

I'm curious to hear what others think.

[tellyworth]

I think there are some great ideas here. The key thing really is that this should be based on a process and structure that fits what teams need.

I agree that automation and better tracking of non-code contributions will help. But I don't think it can ever be the entire solution. A core part of a community project is communication. A process that lets pledged contributors hit automated metrics without ever communicating with their team is a risk for the project. We also need some kind of method for making sure those contributors are in regular contact with real people.

From a practical standpoint, we could implement an ultra-minimal version of this to begin with and let teams work out what their reporting/sharing needs are: make a periodic call-to-action that asks contributors to check a box saying "yes I'm still active on team x"; and give teams a way to see a list of those contributors who have self-reported as still active. Then work with teams over time to find out what questionnaires would suit them, how to review answers, and what other processes are needed.

[patriciabt]

Any news on this? and can I help?

I think that self-reporting could highly prevent those fake/overused/outdated pledges. Or the self-reporting questionnaire as mentioned above, maybe to add to the automated one, such as "What did you do this month that has not been automatically recorded in your activity?"

Would that appear as "Did this in that month, and that in that month"? instead of the current "contributes X hours per week" in profiles, as we don't know if those hours are ongoing or once in the past, and as said in #169 by Timi, "those eats credibility of valid pledges"

[StevenDufresne]

because I worry about how consistently folks will do the extra "paperwork" on top of their existing commitments

As Ian notes, I think we need to have a few conversations with participants/community members to understand this risk better.