Recognizing more types of contribution in the Drupal.org Marketplace

These seem like logical improvements to the organization ranking, but I would really like to see the DA put as much (if not more) focus on the communities of contributors who operate in sectors like higher education than the organizations that sell services to these sectors.  I understand that the groups who sell Drupal related services are important to the DA and the Drupal project, but when I read this post, Megan's post about the industry verticals and still have to navigate to the full list of organizations from the sidebar of Marketplace, it's hard not to feel like the DA values me more as a someone who can influence purchasing decisions at my organization for vendors of Drupal than it values my organization's contributors to the Drupal project.

I know these issues get lost as progress is made, but I made the case for what I wanted to see back in https://www.drupal.org/node/2580729.  Because we still can't sort organizations that use Drupal by sector, we wrote something to find the the higher ed organizations in the full list and started posting the Top 10 Contributing Higher Education Organizations.  You may have noticed several new higher ed organization nodes have been created since that was published.  I plan to blog about updates to that list each month and highlight some of the contributions.   As an organization, CU is actively trying to top Waterloo for the #1 spot.  

This looks very interesting, especially for members of actively contributing Drupal organisations/companies.

Just an aside - if someone notices an organisation on the marketplace that may be incorrectly self-categorised (for example, they say they have offices in a country but they don't, and may be trying to game the system), is there a flagging/reporting mechanism?

@hestenet: How about including project releases?  Some of us spend a fair amount of time cutting releases when nobody else does so we're not all stuck with development versions.

Credit for anything related to camps would be great; sponsoring, organizing, and speaking, Though it may be terribly difficult to get accurate information on volunteers, sponsorship and speaking should be easier to verify. Maybe you can start with drupalcon.

One question. Are there plans to use the ranking for any other lists? I believe this is currently used only for the service providers page? What about the other ones like the training page. I think that is still just alphabetical.

What about documentation and support? I don't see anything in the current or planned credit system that addresses people who maintain documentation guides on drupal.org, edit or create documentation pages, or voluntarily provide support and guidance to other members of the community (via forums or StackExchange or IRC, which of course would be hard to track).

The idea of weighting rank based on involvement in hosting meetups and camps has been discussed within higher ed organizations involved in EDUDU, but the devil is in the details.

There are several camps hosted universities and colleges.  The problem is that not all of these are equal effort/value.  Some schools charge the full rate they change any other event.  Other offer the Drupal community a discount because the school benefits.  Some university IT groups pay the hosting fee out of their budget.  Other schools host for free.

How to do you track this level of detail?  How what value do you give it?

As @jhodgdon has pointed out, commits are not all equal either.  One big difference is commits happen so often giving "unearned" credit isn't that big of a deal.  I will often give a new contributor credit for a patch even if I had to rewrite 90% of it to encourage future contributions.  

Camps only happen once a year, but many require a lot more effort than most commits.  We are only only giving credit for commits in the last 90 days (I think?). How long do you factor in credit for hosting or organizing a camp?

As @jhodgdon has also pointed out, patch -> commit process includes a method to provide feedback about who deserves credit.  When documentation is managed with commits, it also has this.  

PA reviews currently do not.

The number of truly unhelpful reviews I've read from new Drupal.org users whose only motivation to do a review was the bonus required to avoid PAR's 1+ year backlog is maddening.  I can't imagine how the Drupal project could possibly do more harm to itself than giving even more of a value the garbage reviews many developers experience as their first interactions with the Drupal community.

I understand that the Project Application Revamp is on the DA's roadmap and that credit could be rolled into that project, but to really do it right you are going to need a Stack Overflow-esque point system.  I would really hate to see fixing PAR get delayed yet again because this makes it even more complicated.

All of this said, I was skeptical of the commit credit tracking and organization credit when it was announced and you've done a phenomenal job with that.  I'll try to remain optimistic that you'll find out elegant ways to factor in these other contributions as well.

There is nothing done recognizing small individual contributors that write bug reports or help out in the forums or write or review patches and hence move an issue forward with constructive comments ... or in general if there was a way to distinguish the help givers as opposed to the help getters it would be nice ... correct me if there is something like this already in place ... but I was thinkin for rating system for each question and answer or general post (perhaps something like stackoverflow)

In core issues, we credit people who file helpful bug reports, who provide reviews, and who post constructive comments equally with people who author patches. We've had this as a practice for a year or two (it wasn't always). Hope that is encouraging!

I've made these suggestions offline previously, but I'll repeat here.

Re these goals:

encouraging organizations to sponsor development of Drupal, gathering more Drupal 8 success stories that can be used to promote Drupal adoption, and recognizing the financial contributions that promote the fiscal health of the Drupal association.

Seemingly missing is the (obvious) question: what's the best way to meet the needs of organizations looking for service providers? Which is, presumably, the main reason we have marketplace listings in the first place.

Specifically: is the average Drupal user best served by the companies that have contributed the most? That idea sounds self-evidently wrong. Companies that have contributed the most will tend to be large and costly. So, from the point of view of Drupal users rather than service providers, the current system might serve large corporations well, since they are indeed looking to connect with top level service providers. But for everyone else it would seem to be more of a barrier than a help.

So an improvement might be: use the statistics gathered to class actively contributing companies into groupings, from low to high contributions, in, say, five classes. Don't use these to order results. Instead, provide a search facet, defaulted to, say, the second lowest class, then order results alphabetically. By default, users browsing the marketplace would see alphebetized listings of the companies that meet a threshold of current contribution.

This would provide an incentive to actively contribute. It would also allows users to filter for the highest contribution levels, if they wish. It might avoid many of the problems with the current system.

And once again forum contributions are completely ignored.

A well written blog post about a module can take more time than actually writing the code.  The Planet feed gets some of the data about the number of posts in the feed.  The feed could be linked to an org, but without some custom Drupal meta tagging similar to the commit message structure, I'm not sure how you would credit an individual with having written the blog.

Rating seems to work fine, take a look at the system used by MOZ Q&A with an interesting voting system, and comment voting, etc. or the very well know Quora Q&A site with multiple rewards system for individual contributors

Drupal 8 case studies

Is this part accurate? When looking through the marketplace it looks like the case study counter for every org is including their total, not just D8 case studies. Is there a difference between what is calculated and what is displayed or is the calculation not limiting to 8?

They are two different numbers. The display on organization pages and listings, for all stats, are straightforward counts. The ranking calculation has additional factors, like only counting D8 case studies.