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Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by rejschaap on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @06:06AM (#7596897)
I know this is all in good spirit and you just want to show some appreciation for the help. But rewarding programmers by number of commits is a bit perverse. Nowadays everyone generally agrees that paying programmers per line of code is a bad idea. I think rewarding based on number of commits creates very similar unwanted incentives and should probably be avoided completely.
Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by konklone on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @09:19AM (#7597528)
We could also do PRs accepted, or issues closed, or other things a little less squishy than commits. But either way - it'll probably be fine.
Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by Loque on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:39PM (#7598814)
Needs backlog with priority value, progress state... basically paper trail.

Also, I like the idea of this project, but I hate the pitch. I don't know why. Maybe it is because programmers already go above and beyond, taking care of the stuff that no-one else thinks over. I would actually suggest investing time in looking to fund better development. Just my 2 cents - great idea, best of luck!

Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by unhush on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @04:32PM (#7600354)
Thanks for the feedback!

The tech team at EFF is pretty overloaded all of the time; we've hired outside contractors before but this is a project where it seems more efficient (and potentially more fun per person) to crowdsource. The same goes for HTTPS Everywhere (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere), a browser extension that I maintain where almost all of the 10,000+ XML (ugh!) http-to-https upgrade rules are contributed by volunteers.

I think EFF is in a rare position to experiment with crowdsourced programming tasks, because (most of) our contributors don't have any incentive to game the system and deliberately submit low-quality work, which decreases the usefulness of results you get from money-driven crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. This particular experiment was far more successful than I predicted, which brings up the question of whether there is a systematic way to make crowdsourced web development effective.

Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by collyw on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @06:59AM (#7597022)
Agreed. I was trying to package some Python files yesterday, so I could easily install them via git / pip. That took a lot of commits before it actually worked.
Re:Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help by ColdHawaiian on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @08:12AM (#7597227)
I guess a better measure of contributions would be number of distinct features implemented and number of bugs fixed.