Transparency in open-source software
A lot of effort is wasted in volunteering. Especially when people are giving away their time for free, I think we need to be just as careful as what we point their time at as if they were charging for their time.
For solo projects, there’s an additional layer: it’s fun to write software. Who cares if anyone’s using it? But there might also be another problem that would be both fun to write software for AND people would actually use.
Closed projects do this to prove their value (say quarterly results or even on their landing page), it’s interesting that open ones often don’t. Capitalism has come up with a great way to not waste money and effort on things no one uses: we track what’s being used, and how, and inform time investment based on that. Because time is free when we’re building the commons, why measure? I think this is backwards.
Universal blue project - a downstream project of Fedora - recently started measuring very precisely who is using what. More interestingly, the same tools helped me shed light on who was using what of the upstream. And the numbers were surprising.
I think we need to track who’s using what in the commons, so that less effort is wasted. If you have volunteers, you’re more obligated to measure, not less. Let’s use the tools of capitalism to improve the commons.
