Re: [gentoo-soc] Re: Council web app - weekly report #3

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:46 AM, Joachim Filip Bartosik
<jbartosik@gmail.com> wrote:
>    Application now tracks slaking properly - it marks participation
> after meeting (council members who voted at least once are present).
> Then it calculates "slacking status" for current council members based
> on council term start date and participations.

Honestly, I've seen this kind of thing tried so many times and fail in
so many situations that I have to say that I think this isn't the
right way to go about this.

Why not let somebody in the Council just mark off attendance?
Sometimes automation isn't the best solution.  What if somebody was
present but there was only one vote and they didn't vote, or whatever?
 I could see some value in the thing helping to facilitate taking
attendance (looking at who talked during the meeting and suggesting
that to the attendance-taker for confirmation).  In the end, however,
deciding whether somebody slacked shouldn't be based on an algorithm -
if it fails for whatever reason then suddenly we're back to just doing
it manually 100%.

I'm a big fan of KISS for these sorts of things.  The 95% solution is
a lot better than the 99.9999% solution that is worth 10% when it gets
something wrong trying too hard to get it all right.

Rich