Michael DeHaan napisal(a):
> If the level of exclusiveness is to high it means that the
project
> associated with the mailing list is going to die in the long perspective
> because there is no fresh blood. Thus, the thing developers should
> be informed about: invite somebody to your development process,
> speak with other people, answer their needs and so on.
>
Careful ... impose the scientific method here, rather than building code
to validate assumptions.
Quite right. My proposal is rather a kind of research proposal than
final solution for all the problems of the world, but I don't say that
the prospective results are going to show you things with 100%
confidence. Nevertheless, I am able to prepare methodologically correct
algorithms. Being correct doesn't mean that the categorization will be
faultless. I proposed an algorithm which does a bit of statistical
analysis and its decisions are based on some simple statistics and
thus it may not work for all cases, but should work for 95% of them.
The rest is human's contextual knowledge.
To sum up: I say that I can only guarantee that definitions, algorithms
and results will be compatible. Nothing more. At this level it's user's
task to assess if the results are accurate.
It's a slippery slope, because you can always find data to back
up a
theory, the real challenge
is learning new things.
Exactly. And I think that my project can teach us some new things.
There is no theory I would like to back up. I would rather like to check
if such algorithm can tell us some interesting thing. Of course there
is a risk that the results won't be accurate. But I think that possible
gains are good enough to give it a try.
What you are talking about there, I do kind of agree with, but the
stat
is mailing list membership
and how many people are posting, not who is talking to who, per se.
Uh, the who is talking to who is actually a bit of internal thing.
It's rather the base that we are building on. We won't show listings
of replies to end users.
> With this tool you can easily assess if the community is
"healthy".
> If you lack temporary users then something is bad: there is no new
> comers. It's not a good prognosis for an open source project.
>
I don't think the concept of "temporary users" is key here. Long-term
users are just as good.
What you want to measure is actually just "growth".
I would rather say - dynamics. And not only in one dimension.
You can't learn new things if you look at things in the same
dimension - len(all_members) - all the time.
--
Regards,
Wojtek Walczak,
http://tosh.pl/gminick/