I appreciate Jonathan sounding out the arguments against the proposed form
of the award, and offering some alternatives.  In short, I think I agree
with him.

I was at Karen's "OSS Metrics" breakout session, and had a lot of
reservations about the "output" of the session, even though the discussion
there was interesting and well-intentioned.  It comes down to the two
decision-making processes: the internal c4l one for making the award and the
external one(s) being influenced by it.

We were listing criteria one might use to evaluate a given project.  And it
was a good enough list of issues, but I kept thinking that it was bound to
fail if it were a scorecard to be used *comparatively* between otherwise
heterogeneous projects on different platforms, in different environments,
with different purposes, etc.  I wasn't even confident of our ability to
review one individual criteria like "security" for a given project, let
alone amongst all projects.  For the amount of work and expertise it would
take to evaluate that honestly, we could be contributing *fixes* to even the
"lesser" projects.

But I'll put aside the question of how accurately we could pick amongst
totally diverse projects.  Pretend we could.  I don't think we could
communicate the objective context to the external decision makers who would
consider themselves informed by the mere fact of the award.

The Journal featuring a project has none of these problems, because it can
maintain context.  Like "Is this project useful to archivists in major
institutions?" or "Is this OSS project a good alternative to a different
proprietary software X?"

I also like the role of code4lib being more of a contributer and less of an
arbiter.  If the goal is to benefit the cool projects, keep the money, show
me the code.

--Joe Atzberger,
LibLime

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> As I think about the award idea more, I still don't really like it. (Sorry
> Eric!).
>
> Some comments at
> http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/why-i-dont-like-the-code4lib-code-award-idea/
>
> With a shorter version below (thanks Jodi).
>
> The award will inevitably be seen as an endorsement of the awarded project
> by ‘Code4Lib.’ While some supporters say this is not the intention, I’ve
> also seen supporters say the reason they want the Code4Lib name on it is so
> the award will have more prestige. To me, this implies that an implied
> endorsement in fact is part of the idea: What else would this prestige be
> for? But whether it’s intentional or not, it’s inevitable.
>
> The Code4Lib community has indeed garnered a fair amount of prestige
> lately, including by people who don’t really understand the informal and
> non-official nature of Code4Lib. I’ve seen Code4Lib erroneously referred to
> as an ‘organization’ several times. Much of this audience will see such an
> award as an endorsement of the project awarded, by the prestigious
> ‘Code4Lib’.
>
> But I don’t think Code4Lib actually has the capacity to accurately and
> useful determine value of an open source project.
>
> Libraries need to learn how to evaluate open source projects on their own,
> for their own circumstances and needs. Libraries, always on the look-out for
> shortcuts, are going to be really tempted to use a Code4Lib award as a
> shortcut to their own investigation. If it’s awarded by Code4Lib, it must be
> good. I worry about anything that discourages libraries from the hard work
> of developing their own capacity to evaluate projects; and I also worry
> about such an implied endorsement actually steering them wrong because I
> don’t think we have the capacity to reliably make such universally
> applicable evaluations as a community. Sure, the award won’t be intended as
> such, but it will be read as such.
>
> I would actually love to see a regular “notable project review” feature in
> the Code4Lib Journal, perhaps in every issue. This could cover only articles
> that the reviewers thought were exceptionally good, or it could cover any
> project of note.
>
> And reviews would have particular reviewer’s bylines attached, making it
> clear who was doing the evaluation, and discouraging the reader from
> thinking it’s the “Code4Lib community”, which isn’t capable of speaking with
> one voice anyway (nor do we desire it to).
>
> If the goal of the idea is to inject some money into library-domain open
> source software development, than rather than an award with compenstaion, I
> think the money could more effectively be spent funding an internship or
> some kind.
>
> Perhaps something like Google Summer of Code. Give a stipend to some
> library student (or currently un- or under-employed Code4Libber, but I like
> the idea of getting library students involved as bonus) to work on a
> Code4Lib community project. Perhaps the community could vote on which
> project(s) were eligible for such an internship, and then people could apply
> expressing their interests, and a smaller committee would actually match an
> intern with a project.
>