On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 08:36:46PM -0500, John Leslie wrote:
Somebody help me, please: If the time of active contributors is a
precious resource, isn't the obvious solution to encourage more folks
to _become_ active contributors?
Only the competent ones. There's a reason why all of the successful
companies in Silicon Valley spend a huge amount of effort making sure
that you don't hire people who will drag down the rest of the team.
So if there is a way of encouraging the compentent to be active
contributors, and discourage the incompetent, the open source project
and standards body is more likely to thrive. The fact that someone
has the funding to attend a face to face meeting, whether it be to an
open source conference, or a standards meeting, certainly does not
correlate perfectly with competence, granted.
But my personal experience is that it works surprisingly well, so the
fact that face to face meetings might make it harder for those who
can't find someone who thinks it worthwhile to fund their work and/or
travel, is not something that I personally have a problem with. Of
course, I'm not on the IETF leadership, so fortunately, it's not up to
me. :-)
Cheers,
- Ted