On Feedback

A very interesting piece on the value of feedback in an open source project...

"This has been something on my mind for a long time--how can we see the great many interconnecting lines between different parts of community. In effort to make progress this area, I have worked closely with my team to build some metrics to understand our community. These metrics are mostly based around bugs, but they give us a solid idea of how to see additional parts of the picture. But metrics are one thing - they show progress and they show the timeline of progress, but they don’t provide good solid feedback. They don’t help us to fix things.

"Like any Open Source project, we get our fair share of criticism about what we do. Although I cannot guarantee that we will always make the right choices every time, I can guarantee that we make every effort to make the right choices based on informed evidence. The work that my team and I have been working on recently is to help better make those choices. To achieve this we have been on something of a feedback shopping spree..." [Read more]