Panel: Measuring Community Contributions (Liveblog)

Panelists:
Joe Brockmeier - OpenSUSE
Jono Bacon - Ubuntu
James Bottomley - Novell
Dan Frye - IBM
Karsten Wade - Fedora

• Don't always associated "contribution" with "code".
• People tend to contribute things that are of value to them - they are scratching their own itch.
• Measuring community is very new and is not an exact science.  There's still a lot to learn and we're still making mistakes.
• Having a clear answer to "how do I get involved" is very important.
• The first mistake companies often make when they try to enter the Linux community is an attempt to push things upstream as-is and in a way that only benefit the company.
• Audience question: It seems most mainline kernel development comes from the developed world.  Why isn't more coming from India, China and other developing countries?

• Dan indicated that some IBM'ers are actually effectively contributing from BRIC countries, but admits that we can do a much better job here.
• Some of this is an infrastructure problem, which is already being worked on.

• Audience question: Is there a way to objectively measure contribution?

• Intuition is our starting point, but we're moving toward reverse intuition.
• Fedora is using EKG - https://fedorahosted.org/ekg/
• Every project focuses on different aspects and different items are important to them.
• Measuring community started out very informally, but as we mature we're being much more rigorous and scientific in our measurements.
• Deciding what to measure can be difficult.
• Measuring for the sake of measuring is senseless.  Getting data that is useful is very important.
  Audience question: is anyone measuring the way people are mentoring?
  
• Generally yes, but it's vastly different for each project/community.

--jeremy