[erlang-questions] Volunteers wanted for new project

[Michael Turner]

"But at this point it's not a software project, but a social, not something
developers tend to like to do...."

There's nothing very social required in responding to an inquiry about
submitting your software project to a database.  If the inquiry itself was
automatically generated, it requires nothing social at all: it's a human
being responding to a machine, not to another human being.  But at least you
haven't completely bypassed the only meaningful arbiter of quality: human
beings.

Bypassing human involvement entirely (the approach taken with the
erlang.orgprojects page) means that the job of building a good
database becomes an AI
problem.  Not a very well-posed one, in this case.  Nor very well-solved
either.

" Of course, this makes it more valuable..."

Good, cheap, soon -- pick any two.

The nice thing about open source is that if any significant portion of the
user base is willing to work for free at all, you can get a fair amount of
reasonably good work done cheap (though not necessarily soon.)  However,
that's provided you make the work easy enough to do, or interesting enough,
or both.  Piling all source packages together in one place if they only
match a few keywords in searches made in likely locations ... well, that
isn't making any of the remaining work very easy.  You're making it harder,
if anything.  And it's definitely not making the work very interesting.  In
this case, it seems the result is something that didn't even turn up what
Joe wanted.

Full automation for this kind of task: that gets you "very cheap", and "very
soon" -- but it doesn't get you "good enough."  Faster isn't better.
 Cheaper isn't better.  Only better is better.

-michael turner

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Attila Rajmund Nohl <
attila.r.nohl@REDACTED> wrote:

> 2010/7/22, Michael Turner <michael.eugene.turner@REDACTED>:
> [...]
> > Don't try to
> > automate the listing of Erlang-coded packages.  Instead, when you find
> what
> > might be an Erlang-coded package, make use of *human* intelligence:
> contact
> > the people responsible for the code, asking if they are interested in
> being
> > listed.
>
> But at this point it's not a software project, but a social, not
> something developers tend to like to do. Of course, this makes it more
> valuable...
>
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