Category: Community

In one of the previous posts, Matthias pointed out that we need to focus more on getting people to vote on open moderations. I’d like to brainstorm a little on this…

I have plans for a more elaborate editor rating system that would replace our black and white automoderator system. This new system will create many levels of privileges and automatically adjust an editor’s rating based on their editing/voting history. As an editor moves up in the rating, fewer of their edits will be put to a vote or perhaps require fewer votes to pass. Many of the details of this new system have not been worked out.

However, until we get to this system which ought to reduce the overall number of edits required to be voted on, we should somehow attempt to encourage people to participate in the peer review voting process. So far we know:

1. Voting i-frame: A “vote on this edit” i-frame shown at the top of each artist/album page didn’t increase the voting much but encouraged people to just start clicking the no button causing lots of pain for many editors. Voting no become too easy. Once we turned this off by default and made it optional the problem of random no voting went away.
2. Forcing people to vote: Forcing people to vote never works. People will vote anything just to get past the obstacle. This is not a viable solution.
3. Showing top voters: The top voters list encouraged more people to vote, but that wasn’t enough. This shows that giving people credit for their work encourages others to participate more.

We’ve probably learned more, but these are the big lessons I remember. Please post a comment if you remember something I’ve forgotten.

The only thing that has worked to a degree was to put active voter’s names in lights and give credit where credit is due. For quite some time I’ve thought about using an eBay like system to put more informative icons before users name to indicate the user’s status. eBay uses stars and other icons to show the status of a user to give people immediate feedback about the trustworthiness of the seller.

What if we create a new icon for users that graphically shows the editor status and the voting status of the user?

Editor status:

1. Newbie registered less than two weeks ago
2. Less than 100 edits
3. Less than 500 edits
4. Less than 1000 edits
5. More than 1000 edits

Voting status:

1. 0 votes cast
2. less than 100 votes cast
3. less than 500 votes cast
4. less than 1000 votes cast
5. less than 5000 votes cast
6. more than 5000 votes cast

These numbers/breakdowns are just randomly made up to illustrate the point — I’d like to have the community suggest actual values and graphical representations of these values if we proceed with this plan. What do you think of this approach?

Finally, I’d like to play devils advocate: What if our magic number of ~6000 open edits is our steady state? What if none of our actions ever change the number of open edits?

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communities, musicbrainz

Part 3 talks short term solutions to problems — things to tackle immediate problems: (also see part 1 and part 2)

Bugs mailing list: In order to solve the problem of opacity of the bug system (its hard to see what people are saying in bug reports unless you spend quite a bit of time following bug reports) I’m going to implement the bug triage suggestion. With this system, every time a bug is submitted or changed an email is posted to the new musicbrainz-bugs mailing list. This will allow more people to monitor the flow of bug reports. (This is almost done, but I am experiencing problems setting up the new mailing list — I’ll need to wait for Dave to return from holidays)

Forums: It appears that even the sternest nay-sayers on forums agree that its time to get these set-up. I’ve asked Lukas to see if he is still interested in spearheading this effort. UPDATE: Lukas is still interested in taking care of this.

Mirror and test server maintainers wanted: Maintaining the nl. mirror and the test/staging server is work I would like to give to someone else. The test server in particular needs work to make many sandboxes for new developers to come in and play with mb_server without having to install a whole setup on their own machine. Anyone interested in this job should be reasonably familiar with mb_server. Send me mail or post a comment if you can help!

support@: As mentioned in part 1, I could use more help with mails sent to support@. Wolfsong has been graciously helping this this task, but as it happens with volunteers he gets busy with real life from time to time. Zout joined the effort to answer emails today and I am wondering if there are other people who would like to help with this. I’d like to have a team of people answer mails sent to support@ and info@ on a first come, first serve basis. Send me mail or post a comment if you’d like to help out.

Conflict resolution: During the August IRC chat we discussed the need for an official body of people to help with conflict resolution here at MusicBrainz. Its clear that conflict resolution is a task to be handled by more than one person in public. I’m currently attempting to find a moderator and a suitable time to have this discussion. My hope is to do this on a Sunday so that as many people as possible can jump into this chat. I’ll post details when I have them.

Stefan: I’ve mailed Stefan to see if he was even interested in being a MusicBrainz developer again. He didn’t give me a clear answer, so I will wait for concise word from Stefan on this issue.

Part 4 will talk about documenting the MusicBrainz development process — more tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: communities, metabrainz, musicbrainz

In part 1 I set the groundwork for how we arrived at our current situation of me being overloaded, and in part 2 I would like to start looking at long term solutions to issues from part 1. Part 3 will look at more short term solutions.

I know there are a number of people who do not like the fact that MusicBrainz is a business. But we have to realize that MusicBrainz and its legal parent the MetaBrainz Foundation is a non-profit business and that it would not really be possible to grow such a project without it being a business. (Before we started the non-profit everything was owned by myself, which IMHO is a much less desirable way of doing this.) We are still an open source project. We’re also an open data project.

Something is working: We have users, editors, peer reviewers and loads of traffic. We even have $$$ money flowing into the non-profit. The community is constantly asking for more features to expand the database and to improve the service.

However, something is not working: We’re dreadfully short on server developers. The number of people who have made serious contributions to the mb_server project can be counted on one hand (or pretty close to that). In order to work on mb_server you need to have a linux box, with free disk space, a fair amount of RAM and you have to have the skills to deal with the long INSTALL process. Some people simply do not own a machine that is capable of doing this!

And even those people who can deal with technical requirements are not necessarily up for the social issues that come with the job. The community can be very demanding and quite harsh at times — no one wants to work long hours for free only to have their work insulted. Compared to ordinary open source projects, mb_server is quite challenging to work on. No doubt about it, its a tough and harsh job that people have been doing for free.

Going forward I will be working very hard to raise funds in order to hire a full time mb_server developer. We’ve passed the point where we can handle all of the mb_server development tasks with volunteer labor. Programming a project towards self-sustainabilty is quite different from programming to scratch an itch. We still have many itches that I hope volunteers will take on, but managing and coding towards sustainability will soon need to be handled by a full time paid developer.

How do we accomplish such a thing? Ever since the last summit where we hammered out the Next Generation Schema I’ve been talking to potential sponsors about donating money towards the development of this next version of MusicBrainz. Finally we have a concrete task to focus on, rather than just trying to make the basics work. Various companies have been receptive to this idea and I will continue to look for sponsors for this task.

My goal is to raise $100k – $200k in hopes of being able to secure a salary for an engineer for one year. The hope is to sell enough data licenses in the course of that year to keep the developer on and pay for this person’s salary. Once this engineer is on staff, I would expect to see 2-4 releases over the this year to prepare for and roll out the Next Generation Schema.

I expect that my time will continue to be taken by running the business development aspects of Musicbrainz and interacting with the community and partners. However, please don’t take this as me no longer participating in the development process. I will still be involved — certainly to manage the process and also to hack out my personal itches. I just don’t think its viable for me to be the official maintainer of any major pieces of code.

Please keep in mind that this is long term planning. I have no schedule for when this will happen. Please don’t mail me in two weeks asking to be hired or to have Next Generation Schema working.

Technorati Tags: communities, metabrainz, musicbrainz

I’m finally back from being on the road. I’ve caught up on much needed sleep and am now working regular hours again. This means its time to address the various issues that we left to ponder before I went on vacation and my trip to Europe. While I was in Europe and in IRC while I was rebooting our database server, inhouseuk said the following:

inhouseuk: you need to start behaving more like a sort of CEO rather than a one man band 🙂

I agree. But then, what exactly is this sort of CEO (or rather sort of Executive Director) supposed to do? And what isn’t he supposed to do? Thats a really tough question that I would like to pose to the community at large. If you have any thoughts on this, please speak up.

The first thing that I want to do is to describe the job I have been performing for the last two years since the non-profit has been running. Then, with help from the community I would like to come up with my job description going forward. That way we can all be on the same page about I should and should not be doing.

Things that I should probably not be doing any longer are in bold.

Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation

Server maintenance

• Hardware purchasing/acquistion of used hardware
• Colocation issues/contracts/maintenance
• Managing hardware costs and future planning
• Manage off-site servers (nl., test.)

Business Development

• Conferences/tradeshows/schmoozing/maintaining contacts for MusicBrainz
• Meetings with potential partners/licensees
• New licenses sales
• Managing and soliciting sponsors
• Raise funds for further server development

Development

• mb_server (and too little of it)
• lucene searching

Legal Department

• Licenses for data/software/web services
• Contracts for data/licenses/web services
• Interacting with lawyers
• Find pro bono lawyers

Community Relations

• Answering questions in IRC/mail/blog/mailing lists
• Conflict resolution
• Managing developers

Foundation Issues

• metabrainz.org web site/donation tracking
• State/federal filing requirements
• Board of directors management/meetings

Accounting

• Keep general books, manage invoices, pay bills
• File tax reports/manage accountants
• Post monthly financial results
• Manage bank accounts/investments

Support

• Answer support@ emails, with help from Wolfsong
• Help partners/licensees (at least have support@ team help

Please note that not all of these tasks are things I do every week. But should something come up, I have to rise to the task. If a server tips over, I go to fix it. If a customer has a question I ask it. I may just go for weeks without dealing with a tipping server.

Do you agree or disagree with the items I’ve identified as things that I should not handle any more?

Technorati Tags: communities, musicbrainz

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had a number of conflicts surrounding the development of the MusicBrainz server source code. Open source developers must work to foster the community of their projects and work towards creating a consensus towards new/improved features.

After an increasing number of conflicts with the community Stefan was warned that his actions as a developer were not acceptable. After countless emails and a number of Skype calls I warned Stefan that the next time he participated in an escalation with one of the community members that I would remove his developer privileges.

Today another one of these escalations took place and I removed Stefan’s developer privileges.

As of right now, I will assume all duties of the MusicBrainz server developer. I will fix any remaining bugs, settle remaining conflicts and work to get the next bug update done as soon as possible. Fortunately now that I can devote all my time to MusicBrainz, I will have more time to devote to getting new server features coded.

With a heavy heart,

Evil Overlord

Technorati Tags: communities, musicbrainz

The previous blog post about Flagrant managed to raise a number of issues that we had never dealt with before here at MusicBrainz:

• When an artist comes to MB and asks that their data be removed, what should we do, if anything?
• Should an artist be more important than the users? How about music labels?
• How can we tell that someone mailing us is in fact that artist or a valid representative of that artist?

These are very difficult questions to answer and given the feedback from the community to this issue, its clear that people feel strongly about this. Also the favor does not seem to be towards the artists, which intuitively I do not agree with. Rather than deal with these very sticky situations that involve recognizing one person or group of persons more than others, I would like to suggest the following much simpler course of action:

• Every MusicBrainz user is treated the same inside of MusicBrainz.
• Users may have different powers, depending on their past history inside of MusicBrainz. (MusicBrainz is a meritocracy)
• All users start with the same level of power, regardless if they are an artist, a label, a representative of either, or a normal music lover.
• Neither an artist, a label, nor any user can request data be removed from MusicBrainz, unless they have a clear legal argument. Given that MusicBrainz indexes only factual data at the moment, this is going to be very unlikely.

This policy is enforceable since it makes everyone equal. If an artist or a label wishes to enter/remove data to/from MusicBrainz, they must use the moderation system just like everyone else. Please post comments and let me know what you think of this proposal!

P.S. Thanks to our board of directors for chiming in on this important topic!

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communities

Apparently the person who contacted us was not actually authorized to speak on behalf of Flagrant. Now the real Flagrant wants this blog entry taken down because its incorrect, but we don’t censor our blog. So, this entry has the original body struck out so everyone can see what is going on. As for adding information back to Flagrant, please feel free if you feel motivated. And stay tuned for how we plan to handle this case in the future.

It was bound to happen… Today the artist Flagrant asked us to not index any of their music. I’ll leave the artist in place with an annotation so that other brainerz can see the note in the future.

Even though I attempted to appeal to them to reconsider their decision, they did not. Nor did they provide any reason for this. So be it…

Technorati Tags: bands

This is to expand on Don Redman’s post. (click on word post to visit it)

First of all, I would like to take the time to say thanks (in no specific order) to ruaok, luks, g0llum, donredman, yalaforge, dave evans, shepard, tarragon, nikki, inhouseuk, the board of directors, Dan Appleman, Fred von Lohmann, Randy Heinig, the sponsors, those on the top moderators list (both voters and editors) as well as countless others that built the database, refine it and help make it a great place to visit and tweak.
(no, this is not an academy award acceptance speech. ;0) )

Luks is now the keeper of picard, wow, big responsibility! Remember it’s a free program and still in beta. It has growing up to do, but isn’t it great we have the ability to utilize it now, instead of after everything is polished? That’s part of beta testing. All these people get is the bugs, they need some support and love along the way! Good job as far as I’m concerned. It’s constantly developing to a more stable and useable product.

As far as the community goes. There is first a question as to what Musicbrainz purpose is. Is it a tagger, is it a repository for information on music, is it ???. I personally feel this was best summed up by ruaok

“I think our goal needs to be a comprehensible music encyclopedia with a killer tagging app.”

So that in mind, I’m taking the initiative to sum up the chat and try to define a few things, while also getting some of the community to sit back and realize a few things.

First and foremost; This is a community! We all strive to help make it work and grow. If all you are doing is pestering for something new realize developement takes time! Either we can push for some half baked fixes, or we can be patient and wait a little while for a shiny near perfect database we all have been trying to envision and some souls have spent a lot of time and effort to perfect and create for those others of us less capable in programming or lacking in time to help.

There are numerous ways to help and join the community.

monetary contribution

which keeps musicbrainz on the web for all of us.

coding

which helps development of applications and will develop the new schema. Which I might add, will implement changes making obsolete many issues which are argued to death on the mailing lists at this time.

watching the issues

ordering them in a sensical fashion, guiding implemention of small changes where possible, as long as it doesn’t require code changing.

wiki work

helps new users better join in the advancement of the community.

Voting

helps to insure correct data is being put into the database

Editing

correcting in accuracies in the current data.

So, there are many ways you can become an active, cherished participant of the community. Virtually, if you don’t like the way things are going, please, join us and help us improve it! But, be patient and always realize people are giving what they can to our project, which is improving with each line of code, each vote, and each piece of data corrected.

Another thing to remember, these are people behind these names. People with lives, people with difficulties beyond your need to tag your audio file, or your desire to look at one page and have it perfectly laid out to your specifications. They get sick, they feel let down when they’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months on developing something and all they can hear is, that’s nice, I want this, or I want more. Or, worse of all, that’s crap, I don’t like it. Yes, bugs are important to be pointed out! Please provide answers, suggestions, if you have no idea of a suggestion, maybe you need to just file a trac ticket and walk on. Neutrality is a very good trait to embrace. Look from your own view, but look from theirs too.

Coming soon is an update to give those in the community an idea of what is being done. What to expect, and a highlighting of those people in the project that aren’t as apparent from an average musicbrainizens point of view.

Don Redman already gave a link to the log for anyone to read for themselves. I ask and close to demand those in our community sit back, relax and let some of the behind the scenes work progress. Or, better, become a part of the team, and help us develop what we are working toward, the great improvements rather than having our coders attempting to please the masses and direct their time to less important things that have been endlessly discussed and looked into. Ultimately leading to the developement time being taken away from those greater visions that aren’t too far around the corner!

You can also greatly help by digging back through the archives and chat logs. It’s likely there has been a discussion already about what you’re seeking to have implemented.

The more initiative you take, the more you will be involved and part of our community. Surprisingly, the community is very open and willing to help those that desire to help improve our community. The more complaining without answers, without constructive criticism, the more likely those people that support the community the most will not desire to be spending as much time in development, or will become bitter, or will need a break from this. Ultimately, would that be better? I don’t believe so. That’s my two cents, and thank you, once more to all the above I listed. I totally appreciate what Musicbrainz provides for my desires and I look forward to the future!

Nyght aka Beth

There was a very good talk about the state of the MusicBrainz community and the plans for future development on irc just now.

It went from 20:03 to 21:52 on 2006-05-04.
It started with a kind of rant by Wolfsong, developed into a discussion about what is going wrong in the MusicBrainz community these days, and led to some pretty simple steps that might help to make things better.

I just wanted to bring this to everybody’s attention, before I go to sleep. I might get to adding a short summary tomorrow, but not now, sorry.