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Might not be a *popular* idea but how about having a place on the KDE sight where Developers are listed and their rating is posted as well?

I've read a lot of negative or at least frustrated USER posts on this forum. I'm a user too, and am sometimes frustrated with KDE. Usually the rant boils down to, "The developers aren't listening to ME the user" and "The USER's have an unreal expectation of ME the KDE developer."

So why not have a link with the developers posts or signatures on applications where I can click on it and I can see info about the developer. Specifically I might see an area of common interest, or an area of common dialogue. I may see how much time this particular developer has to contribute to the KDE project on a weekly basis. Just seeing this might help me realize that the developer is not a 'full-time' worker on KDE and may only have 2 or 3 hours a week to contribute to application development! Knowing this would surely temper my expectations of him/her!

(EDITED -- Maybe more controversial would be a grading system of the developer and his effort. Much like the number of "like" and "dislike" votes on boards. Truly this is the only concrete way the USER can express his satisfaction with the product and it's development. -- End of EDIT)

[added 01/14/10] Just wanted to edit my own idea to make it clear that I don't mean that we should be grading the developer personally, but grading the usefulness of the application. Whether it meets your needs or not. My idea would be a type of instant feedback via the Help menu. Maybe an option there for feedback. The "about" selection produces a pop-up window giving the dev's email addresses anyway. Why not a seperate pop-up for "feedback / comments"

Why not?


xDxD

I vote against it and I explain why :

- First part about devs informations (spent time, interest) :
It look OK at first but I call it judging people, judging based on criterias that means nothing. So because a developers spend 7 hours per day on a software, it's ok to judge him but I should temper with a guy spending 1 hour a week ? non-sense to me. How it's related to the software is working on or to issues with it ?
It's like if moderators of the forum suddenly choose the people they anwser to by looking at post count or amount of donation...

Second part about rating :
Even worse ! and it's still judging people, most of the time an open source software is made by more than 1 devs and numerous contributors, how you handle this ?
And I frankly want to say that I hate this "like" "dislike", only two choices things that pop up everywhere. All is love or is hate, all is black or all is white... Come on, nothing in between, sorry but it just look like brainwashing to me.

it's at the opposite of open source philosophy, devellopers most of time are working on their free time, they giving you software for free and they don't ask anything, it's the true meaning of "sharing" : giving without expecting or wanting anything in return. On the other side user has it's responsability, critizism is welcome when it is constructive, same for new ideas and bug report.

I am not exactly sure what this would accomplish, and seems ripe for abuse. People seem much more likely to vote in something like this when they have a problem with it, which will likely skew the results and discourage developers. If developers' every contribution is going to be scrutinized and judged, I think this would also serve to discourage participation.

Having a list of KDE devs with a short info about them and things that they are currently working on would be a nice thing to have (from my POV).

Everything above that would be just evil

TheBlackCat wrote:I am not exactly sure what this would accomplish, and seems ripe for abuse. People seem much more likely to vote in something like this when they have a problem with it, which will likely skew the results and discourage developers. If developers' every contribution is going to be scrutinized and judged, I think this would also serve to discourage participation.

You make some good observations. People do tend to vote against something more passionately than they vote "for" it. But I still think the grading could be more neutral based. for example asking the user to vote "yes" or "no" as to whether the project meets his needs or development is going in the right direction.

I think a rating system could be done without attacking the developer. Think how incredibly useful that kind of user feedback would be!

I always thought that a developer would want that kind of feedback. To know that he is developing an app that a user would enjoy using. If he's that kind of developer then he should manage his project in a more holistic way. Feedback should be as vital as data input.

I guess the only other school of thought is that a developer develops an app according to his own needs and in so doing isn't as interested in how others use it. His way of thinking might be, "If they want my app to do X, Y, or Z then they can grab the code and develop it themselves."

I'm not saying one school of thought is more correct than another, I just think that the typical KDE user wants to believe that the developer/user partnership model is what drives KDE. Not the "build it yourself" mentality. This really is an important distinction.

ivan wrote:Having a list of KDE devs with a short info about them and things that they are currently working on would be a nice thing to have (from my POV).

Everything above that would be just evil

I think one of the best things KDE did was in revising the "about" selection on an app to include the developer's names and email addresses. This same "about" pop-up window could contain the feedback and project vote tab.

chromatic6 wrote:...but I call it judging people, judging based on criterias that means nothing. So because a developers spend 7 hours per day on a software, it's ok to judge him but I should temper with a guy spending 1 hour a week ? non-sense to me. How it's related to the software is working on or to issues with it ?

Well, every time I use an application I am subconsciously judging the development of it. Not the developer, mind you, but the development of the project as a useful whole. Most of the time when I use KDE it's with sincere admiration. Seems to me that maybe you are saying that developers are too thin skinned to take criticism? Surely not.

Second part about rating :
Even worse ! and it's still judging people, most of the time an open source software is made by more than 1 devs and numerous contributors, how you handle this ?

Good point. See my other post about rating the project rather than the individual developer. "Is the project moving in the right direction. Does it meet your needs and expectations."

And I frankly want to say that I hate this "like" "dislike", only two choices things that pop up everywhere. All is love or is hate, all is black or all is white... Come on, nothing in between, sorry but it just look like brainwashing to me.

I refer you to my previous comment about being thin-skinned!

Thanks to theblackcat, you said what I think in more concise and better way... my english is limited ^^.

@mshelly
I'm agree about what you say but I don't understand how a grading system could be usefull or bring something new and better that what is already here :
- There's bugs.kde.org to report bugs, ask for features and there's already a vote system.
- There's the forum to discuss and the brainstorm section to give ideas and users can vote here too
- There's kde-apps.org where users can globally vote for applications.
Add to this personnal developers blogs where it's possible to leave comments too.

It's not about the fact that developers can't handle critisism, because it's a part of the process in opensource development to critisize. I'm against this because the main idea proposed in the first post is about judging individuals and I don't understand how it can make softwares better to discourage some people or to give an ego boost to others.

The main idea come from the fact that there's "frustrating users ranting". But ranting is the most easy things to do, just go on the phoronix forum, you'll see what I mean
But I don't find there's so much ranting, the forum is globally friendly with people understanding what means to be "a user" as part of the opensource devlopement process.

And if you don't count this case as ranting :
- People that are still on the 3 years old subject about KDE 3 vs KDE 4
- People that hate the cashew (never understood this one)
- People that use bad distro that are bugged as hell and are giving a really bad reputation to KDE IMHO because here I don't even 1% of the issue reported on this forum
- People who said they leave KDE for gnome
After you remove all of this, I don't see so much rating. Maybe the people angry about akonadi and nepomuk, ok it's far from perfect but nepomuk's devs always complain about lack of manpower, I don't know how a rating system could change this.

You are proposing to judge persons instead of their work. Understanding why and how match this things are deferent, is one of the most important things a country's education system should learn it's citizens.

> judging the development of it. Not the developer, mind you,
> but the development of the project as a useful whole.

I understand your point, but judging our work *is* like (maybe even worse than ) judging us. We are doing this from the love of it - so we have to be emotionally involved, and any comment, be it good or bad has to be a personal one.

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On a side note, just check how many people registered here just to post only one negative post and then disappear. And compare that to the number of those that did the same to praise something.

That is the reason scoring like this can't function.

Ah, come on.... I can't believe that developers are worried about getting criticism. Who cares if it's valid, if someone is just sounding off, or if they just register one time to post a flaming post? All feedback contains some kind of useful info. If nothing else you could count a bad or hateful feedback as "general dislike" for the product.

Stack enough of those up and you still see you have a problem!

Your point that people get on the forum to rant is an excellent point. They do this because they are FRUSTRATED! Not because they generally hate KDE. Come on guys... If a user spends hours trying to solve or work around an issue then he is going to be frustrated. He's probably looked at a bunch of outdated internet "help" and wound up exactly where he started. So, yes... He's ranting.

Wouldn't it be much easier to include an option within the Help menu / About pop-up window where a user could directly rate the product (not the developer!) and transmit his views directly to the developer(s)?

In our age of instant communication I don't know why this idea wouldn't be a good thing? Your posts here kind of sound like you developers are hiding behind the safety of this forum. Seriously, how many users are going to bother to come to this forum or go to the bugs website, etc... a VERY small % of the user base.

Come on KDE community, lets be out front and innovative in how we listen to user feedback and translate that into an (even more) exceptional product!

I'm going to say flat-out "no".

Not because it may hurt developers feelings, but also because it draws focus and attention _away_ from where it matters. It stops developers simply looking at "My creation" and "People who use my creation" and instead distracts them with "How popular am I? How do I rank compared to my peers?" Even though this can be perceived fun by users, it's most definitely _not_ helpful towards either the product, the developers, and in the end, the users themselves.

Plus, some of KDE's creations are the results of _several_ people's work, such as in KDE-www. There are many discussions that go on behind the scenes that simply cannot be quantified and credited appropriately. Users are mostly blind to this behind-the-scenes and thus would likely point criticism to the wrong person or people.

Instead, we should look for better ways/outlets to receive criticism, of which the Brainstorm is one method. There are a few more coming soon

KDE is about people, let's not objectify them.

> All feedback contains some kind of useful info

Nope. People who get here just to rant, provide no useful info whatsoever. *

And, while we're at it, being frustrated is not an excuse to be rude or assertive. If we (the developers) were to lash out on the users because we get frustrated due to some 'this is ****' comment, how would the community react?

So, while I understand the need to vent out when frustrated, KDE forums/mailing lists/... is not a place for that.

But we're derailing from the topic.

> Wouldn't it be much easier to include an option
> within the Help menu

Having a feedback option for a program in the Help menu would be (IMO) a good thing. Feedback, with the option to report bugs.

But this brainstorm idea is about 'KDE Developer Rating' (although you appear to have changed your stance to 'KDE app rating / feedback').

If you want, you can create another thread for that idea, I'd gladly vote +1 for it.

> hiding behind the safety of this forum

Nobody's hiding. When somebody wants to talk in accordance to CoC, we are here.

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* See the first post here trunk/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=84804 - although the most pleasant and polite anti-something post I've seen, it doesn't have any useful info or suggestion.

The only suggestion is to throw away a couple of years of development "Please just revert to the previous version and tweak it."

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A nice video about making a Free/Libre Open Source communities:
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid= ... 522818645#

p.s. To avoid being misunderstood - I don't mind anyone disliking something I do, and don't consider "it could work better if you did this and that" to be an insult, and it doesn't "hurt my feelings".

But, [read the first paragraph of my prev post]

ivan wrote:
Having a feedback option for a program in the Help menu would be (IMO) a good thing. Feedback, with the option to report bugs.

Amarok beta has something like this already.