Holding someone up for recognition who is extremely passionate and spends an immense amount of time working on a subject area may not be the best role model to stand up…because the vast majority of people aren’t going to be able to be that kind of contributor. In fact the existence of such people may be indicative of a process problem which makes it difficult to distribute work among many people.

I would personally much rather find the people who make best use of their volunteer time, and then have then explain to others how they organize their time and workflow so we can all learn from them on how to be better contributors. I want to learn how to do what they do even if I only have a few hours a week to contribute and my overall output is small compared to someone who can put in 40 hours a week on contributions.

I don’t want heros to look up to… I want teachers to learn from.

-jef

https://twitter.com/jonobacon/status/5597881627

Just want to say a very public thanks to Jorge Castro on my team. He is doing an awesome job with UDS. Thanks, pal. #ubuntu

https://twitter.com/jonobacon/status/5606825772

I was a little single-focused in my tweet earlier – in addition to Jorge rocking UDS, so has Claire, Maria, Marianna and James. Thanks all!

Or even this:

http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/05/31/announcing-the-fedora-award-winners-for-2007/

… and the outfall from that, which sucked for a long time. Even the best ideas can fail miserably when the underlying meme is incorrect.

Not to take anything away from the winners but where was the community involvement here, Can you show me what list this was proposed on previously? and who judged this award please.

More seriously, I agree, the rock star term is really really unfair to the Jazz Fusion and Techno coders of the world. Everybody should get to have their own band if they want one. Support local music!

So perhaps there is a metric that can be used to count “top” technical writers, but it should be objective and quantifiable. Number of books edited; number of page written; quantity or quality of commits; etc. But that is a pretty big research project with dubious value outside of a doctoral thesis. (Well, I’d like to know, along with tool choices, and lots of other stuff, for any large set of communities, but I cannot code that and don’t (yet) have the influence to Make It So.)

Compared to the people or groups singled out, I just see 1000x the hard work coming from people who usually get thanked in aggregate as part of a team really getting stuff done. I’d rather we spend our time finding out how to make those people feel appreciated. I am unable to hug or send chocolate to all of them, so what to do?

I see that many projects do have well known personalities, and some are flown around to every event. But they are such a small percentage of such a large community that gets so much done, I wonder how much the benefits of that model outweigh the much larger number who get forgotten and feel marginalized?

My argument completely ignores when people feel uncomfortable being singled out. I know I do. Everyone feels differently about being singled out for praise, especially if they are a good team player.