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Include documentation about tracking non-tech contributions

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Signed-off-by: Akashdeep Dhar <akashdeep.dhar@gmail.com>
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Akashdeep Dhar 2023-05-22 15:15:24 +05:30
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docs/fcas/index.rst
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solution_datanote
solution_dataeplt
solution_examples
solution_probntec
solution_techtool

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.. _solution_probntec.rst:
Conundrum of Tracking of Non-Technical Contributions
====
As contributions that involve interacting with services are the only ones that
publish a message on the
`Fedora Messaging <https://fedora-messaging.readthedocs.io/>`_ bus, they are
the only ones that get tracked. These services predominantly facilitate for
technical contributions alone and hence, it becomes increasingly difficult to
track non-technical contributions. Owing to the wide range of creating non
technical contributions and a similarly huge number of subjective methods to
keep track of those - it is comparatively difficult to come up with an
objective method of describing them. What might look like a contribution to one
might not look like a contribution to someone else and therefore, the service
would not be able to reliably track non-technical contributions.
One of the workarounds that could help solving this problem is by creating
badges on the
`Fedora Badges <https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/badges/index.html>`_
platform for each type of non-technical contribution. This cannot be a
solution as this method scales incredibly poorly as the members go on adding
new badges of the manually-awarded kind for tracking each type of non-technical
contributions. This could potentially lead to situations where there are
thousands of badges pertaining to a type of non-technical contribution but with
handful of awardees per badge. Going against the norm of having "subject"
usernames as owners of contribution activities, using Fedora Badges to track
contributions would lead to treating both "subject" usernames (cause of the
message publication event) and "object" usernames (involved in the said
contribution activity) to own a contribution activity.
How? Assuming a contribution event where a "Member X" (who has the access to
award a certain "Badge A" to members who do "Task B") awards a "Badge A" to
"Member Y". As this was a non-technical contribution and because this could not
be automatically tracked by the Fedora Badges' Message Consumer entity - the
event of "Member Y" performing "Task B" could not be reliably and automatically
tracked. The event of awarding the badge essentially confirms two contribution
activities - the first one being "Member Y" performing "Task B" and the second
one being "Member X" awarding the "Member Y" with "Badge A". In the first
contribution activity, the "Member Y" owns the contribution but they are
dependent on "Member X" to award them the badge to have their contribution
tracked. The activity of awarding the badge itself is a contribution so in the
second activity, the "Member X" owns the contribution.
This should be used as an absolute "last ditch effort" to track non-technical
contributions of the kind that do not automatically publish a message on the
Fedora Messaging bus when they take place. As the badges cannot be tightly
associated with the contribution activity itself and the fact that the way of
tracking those are manual in nature, they are very susceptible to be left
untracked (due to reasons like the "contribution owner" forgetting to claim
a badge when they made the "contribution activity" or the "badge felicitator"
being unavailable when being reached out causing delays in tracking of the
said activity) or to be tracked unfairly (due to reasons like the "badge
felicitator" awarding a certain badge to their friends who might not have done
the said "contribution activity" or random members claiming the badge from the
associated link in bad faith). In the larger scheme of things - this will end
greatly skewing the contributor statistics for the worse.