LaserJock

After reading Mackenzie’s post about 5-a-day on the Ubuntu UK podcast I have to say that:

Dave: “What I’m getting at is, the Ubuntu community is vast, why in the last 7 days is there only 35 people working on it?”

is exactly what I don’t like about 5-a-day.

An issue with any metric is that you need to make very sure that you’re actually measuring/reporting what people think you are. 5-a-day stats are exactly that, stats on the 5-a-day participants, not Ubuntu as a whole. A problem with these types of community metrics is that they’re most often based on voluntary participation and the stats actually become more about who participated in the statistical method than the actual “thing” you were trying to measure.

Now, I think a problem with 5-a-day is not that it’s a bad initiative. I think it’s done a lot of great things around the community and I want to see it continue. However, I do feel like there are some issues with it that I think people need to think about some:

1. 5-a-day promotes quantity rather than quality. The problem is clearly that quality is very difficult to measure, but the fact remainst that you can create a lot of bug “churn” and not get much of any actual useful work done. We can create a highly participatory community that contributes pretty much nothing to its users, other distros, or the FLOSS landscape as a whole.
2. 5-a-day is heavily promoted as the way to track bug triaging work in Ubuntu. While it certainly measures some, I believe 5-a-day only measure a minority of the actual work being done in Ubuntu
3. The 5-a-day stats page gives no indication of what it’s actually measuring and could be easily misconstrued, IMO
4. 5-a-day not only doesn’t track all contributors, it doesn’t necessarily track all contributions by a by a particular contributor. It relies on a person actively putting bug numbers in their 5-a-day applet/CLI tool.

Lastly, I think a lot of this comes down to 5-a-day being designed to be a fun “scoreboard” for the community to have a little competition. The problem is when people see it rather as serious business, and especially in these days where Ubuntu is being challenged about its contributions I think we need to be perhaps more careful with how these types of metrics are seen by “outsiders”.

no, I’m not talking about the latest mailing list discussion …

This morning my wife and I got the chance to go to The Great Reno Balloon Race. It’s the largest (over 100 balloons) free ballooning event in the US and we’ve had it here for 27 years. I’ve seen the balloons from a distance before but this year we were invited to help “crew” one of the balloons.

The day starts bright-and-early at 5:30am with five balloons going up at the same time in the dark in what’s called the Dawn Patrol. Seeing the balloons glow in the dark as they ascend was really cool.

The first ballon up is always the American Eagle and the national anthem is played as it gets underway.

American Eagle hot air balloon

We then had a missing-man-formation flyover from some WWII-era planes from the Reno Air Races that are going to start in a few days.

Next everybody started filling up the balloons and launching (they stagger the start times so that there isn’t too much traffic in the air).

Looking from the top as the balloon is being filled

The mass ascension starts

It was really nice, sunny day with calm winds so the balloons stayed fairly close and we got some great shots from the ground.

Looking up at just a few of the balloons

Once the balloon we were crewing (called Daydreams) got off the ground, we packed up the truck and trailer and started chasing it. The breeze ended up blowing it a lot farther than we thought and we had to “walk” it a few hundred yards back to a parking lot where the air was slowly let out and we were able to pack the whole thing into maybe a 3 ft (1m) diameter bag.

In all we were there about 5 hrs (getting back to the car around 10 am) and it really was one of the most enjoyable events I’ve been to since we’ve been in Reno.