Company recognition

[simonwheatley]

My company, and many others, have a policy of sponsoring WordPress community contribution, core and otherwise, by strongly encouraging employees to participate during paid company hours. I want to open a discussion on how this company contribution could be recognised, while not allowing "corporates" to take over the credits page on each release.

• Would greater recognition encourage your company to foster contribution?
• Should companies contributing employee time to WordPress, particularly core contributions, be recognised?
• How should companies be recognised?
• What are the pros and cons for the WordPress project in allowing this kind of recognition?

This follows a ​Twitter conversation re showing company names in the WordPress credits page, and Nacin's suggestion to open this discussion.

and Nacin's suggestion to open this discussion.

On this trac? Please no.

I quite liked my method of adding the company name, in parentheses, after the name. I felt this retained the personal nature of the credits page, it's nice to think your software is built by people rather than corporate robots.

I don't think I'd like to see company names as credits, personally.

Replying to ocean90:

and Nacin's suggestion to open this discussion.

On this trac? Please no.

I'm happy to have the discussion anywhere.

a bad idea, because every patch is created by humans not by corporations,

I do agree with alexvorm2. Also the current situation feels bad. To me at this moment the WordPress development already is controlled by the companies that have their employees contribute a lot to core. I rather first tackle that issue and with that discuss how WordPress can show the appreciation to the companies.

I quite liked my method of adding the company name, in parentheses, after the name. I felt this retained the personal nature of the credits >page, it's nice to think your software is built by people rather than corporate robots.

I don't think I'd like to see company names as credits, personally.

I thought that worked quite well. Would be interesting to see what it would look like if everyone there did the same thing, the page as a whole might lose its "built by real people" feel if everyone has a company affiliation.

I'd also like to see the ability to have company WordPress.org profiles which aggregate activity from all employees, I remember speaking to @otto about it at WPCS a bit and he seemed to like the idea.

Maybe a curated list of companies that do contribute employee time etc. would be useful, if not just for people looking to get a job at such a company, maybe in the sidebar here: ​http://wordpress.org/?

Replying to alexvorn2:

a bad idea, because every patch is created by humans not by corporations,

I've never thought of my company as a corporation, I'm trying to work out whether I like it or not. :)

More seriously, one of our aims at my (and Other Simon's) company is to contribute back to the WordPress by having our human employees raise tickets, write patches, etc, etc, during company time. While I was a freelancer, I did effectively the same thing, I contributed my own time and got my own name on the credits, should my company, with a similar contribution of company time, get the same benefit?

Replying to alexvorn2:

a bad idea, because every patch is created by humans not by corporations,

A lot of contributors probably work for someone, if companies had more incentives to have employees contribute during company time then that would potentially mean more contributors, which is a good thing, right?

Company names do not belong in the credits, or in the name. Parenthesis are really only cool for irc nicks/online aliases. Since the name link goes to your .org profile, where the company name and link are readily available, that should suffice for the company recognition. I would much prefer we all just respect this rather than having to make a rule about it.

I would much prefer we all just respect this rather than having to make a rule about it.

I don't think there is a need for a rule, seems like more of a misunderstanding than disrespect. However it is interesting to talk about other ways in which companies can be credited, like for example having company .org profiles. At the moment ​http://profiles.wordpress.org/humanmade/ does a pretty poor job of reflecting the contributions we as a company make.

Replying to willmot:

At the moment ​http://profiles.wordpress.org/humanmade/ does a pretty poor job of reflecting the contributions we as a company make.

I agree. Profiles as a whole need to get better; we've discussed "organization"-specific things that could help.