From: Ara.T.Howard@...
Date: 2005-05-04T01:05:08+09:00
Subject: Re: "Bounty" approach for small pieces of code?

On Wed, 4 May 2005, Gavin Kistner wrote:

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> On May 2, 2005, at 2:39 PM, Hal Fulton wrote:
>> I seem to recall there was some discussion here of
>> people paying small amounts for small pieces of code
>> (a la rentacoder).
> [...]
>> Does this concept seem interesting to anyone? Worth
>> discussing?
>
> I've been wanting to do something like this on an IRC front for a
> long time, but the issues of Trust have made it hard to figure out
> the details.
>
> It's an exchange of goods where neither person trusts the other, both
> holding on to what they have while grabbing for the other person's
> goods. When it's something physical, you don't let go of what you
> have until you're sure that you have a firm grasp on what the other
> person is offering.
>
> But if it's information, I see two choices:
>
> 1) You let the person offering the bounty review the answer and
> discover if it's valid. How then do you prevent that someone from
> getting their answer and then saying "No no no, that wasn't what I
> wanted at all. I'm keeping my money (and the information that's now
> in my head)." ?
>
> 2) You force the person offering the bounty to pay up before seeing
> the solution. What then do you do if the solution is "Ha ha, you
> suck, I've got your money now!" ? (That case is easy to resolve by a
> third party, but what if the solution is real code ... how much work
> do you want to do diving into each solution and determining if it's a
> 'perfect' match?)
>
> Hrm...what if the answer is precise specifications, in the form of
> unit tests? What if the person offering the bounty is responsible for
> providing a clear set of specifications AND unit tests for the
> interface, and the System runs the unit tests against the solution to
> automatically verify that it's valid.
>
>
> With the IRC model I have been thinking about, you'd need to bootstrap the
> system and get to a point where everyone involved had a nice history of
> Trust rankings, based on grades of their solutions, number of solutions,
> number of disputes, and so on. (You' d also have those rankings distributed
> over a wide variety of information topics.) But that's a general description
> of the end result, and glosses over the details of how to get there (and
> assumes that such a system makes 95% of the people using it happy).

if i were programming the service, IRC or http based, i'd make it invite only
too : you could 'vouch' for me and i'd be allowed in.  once in, you can
invited others.  one could also be ousted if > 50% of the members voted that
way.  this is defintely clickish - but would help clients feel better about
someone without a track record since they could, at least, be highly
reccomened by someone with a good recorde.  even if this wasn't mandatory it
might be a nice additional feature.

cheers.

-a
-- 
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