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Contributor CV and recommendations

Listening to a call about the cool stuff our Community Architecture team is doing with education (such as POSSE and opensource.com/education), I had an idea.  Is it a simple idea?  Yes.  An elegant idea?  So far.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Contributor_CVs

It’s an opt-in system to track an individual’s contributions and recommendations from others within the Fedora Project community.  (Naturally, FLOSS for code and content, use it for your own project, etc.)

For recommendations, we can get started today with a simple process.  You leave a comment in a user’s talk page on the wiki, using the ~~~~ signature format plus the page’s history to verify the recommender.

These recommendations can later be pulled in to a semiautomagic system, which would also provide a nicer interface for making a quality recommendation than a wiki page.  (Or not, if the wiki system proves itself.)

That system can pull in all sorts of data of a contributor across the Fedora Project world.  I imagine it as a module of the Fedora account system (FAS).  Count of wiki edits, numbers of contributions to mailing list discussions, code and content touched in SCMs, count of blog posts on planet with tag cloud, IRC help statistics (somehow) … any ways we can pull in and massage data to give a meaningful result.

Run that in to a cool code/tag/collaboration swarm animation alongside a set of personal recommendations from other project members.  This page is something that can help you get in to school programs, get new jobs or promotions, and who knows what other ways that might have meaning in your life.

All of this to add value to contributors, giving them more reason to enjoy what they do around these parts.  It’s also cool to show your non-project friends and family how and why you spend the time you spend on your FLOSS and community pursuits.

Of course, the data is all exportable; you aren’t trapped carrying this CV at a fedoraproject.org domain, nor are you required to use the project’s service.  There are a ton of privacy concerns involved, solving those has to be a first priority.  People will get competitive or try to game the system, to varying degrees. *shrug*

Um, so … anyone want to help build this?