My Experiences with selecting Ruby Heroes

heroes.md

It's Ruby Hero award selection time, and I've decided this year I won't be participating. I won this award myself in 2010, and I was once a very strong supporter of the idea, so that may come as a surprise.

However, in recent years I've started to feel a few things that have shifted my perspective greatly:

• I tend to view heroics as unsustainable and ultimately harmful in the long run to a healthy ecosystem (even though I've engaged in them plenty myself)

• Most people I know who have had their voice greatly amplified have been worse off because of it. It would be nice to say that recognition doesn't change people's motivations, nor does it change how others perceive them, but we've got deep set cognitive biases that prevent that from being possible. This leads to weird side effects that are hard to enumerate concisely, but those who have read the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" will know what I'm talking about.

• The Ruby Hero awards use a selection process that was efficient and meaningful for a very small community, and seems at best quaint and at worst actively harmful in 2013.

It's that last point I want to focus on.

It's publicly known that new Ruby heroes are selected by existing heroes, and nominations are just to help us discover people for us to consider. Although tons of nominations are received, the Ruby heroes only receive a list of folks that has been prefiltered (presumably by who's name has come up a lot, but it's hard to say exactly). In 2012, this was a list of 12 names. What this means is that the vast majority of people nominated and the comments written on their behalf will never be seen by anyone who votes for new heroes.

Once we have this list, we discuss it a bit in a group, using a combination of consensus and voting. Because the trimmed down list might have missed someone worth considering, each existing Ruby hero can also name people they feel are worth considering. The overall process leaves a lot to be desired for, and I've seen some awkward influences on the process by heroes who are very prominent figures in our community now. That's the exception and not the rule, but it still seems a bit awkward. To avoid pointing any fingers without casting blame on myself... I've probably done this myself without realizing how much it can skew things.

In the end, the finalists are selected from recommendations made by the heroes, and the "top contenders" list that's provided by Gregg. This is esentially the problem: if you haven't received a lot of votes, or you don't know at least one Ruby Hero who might vouch for you, there is zero chance you will even be considered for a Ruby hero award -- your merit simply does not factor into things. As a result, I think the people who are selected do deserve to be recognized, but many others are silently ignored in the process.

This to me is a fundamentally broken way of trying to recognize those who haven't been adequately recognized, because it is a popularity contest combined with strong insider influences. It's accidental and innocent, I think. But it's not also what the public tends to think of it as.

So for that reason, I will no longer participate in future Ruby Hero selections. Instead, I will try harder to recognize the lesser known folks in our community whenever and wherever I find them... celebrating acts of everyday progress and generosity, rather than heroism.

I am honestly sorry to be throwing a wet blanket on what is otherwise a good-natured idea. I just didn't feel comfortable with this knowledge, didn't feel it would matter much to bring it up within the Ruby Hero committee, and wanted to get it off my chest.

Sorry you feel that way Gregory. I do what I can with the cards I've been dealt. You should know that there have been several people who have won who were no where near the top of the popular list, so the idea that the top nominations win is certainly not true. Your input has always been welcome, and suggestions to make it better. I remember telling you this several times, yet your stance always remains critical, and not complimentary. It's unfortunate that we won't have your input this year, I have a great deal of respect for you as a developer.

@Gregg: What I said was that you must either be near the top in terms of number of recommendations or have already been noticed by at least one of the existing heroes to win. It's the latter part that made sense with a small community, which is now problematic in a larger community. We shouldn't be giving a strong advantage to people because of their connections with past winners -- that runs counter to what the award is all about, right?

Two things that might help make the selection process more reasonable for modern times:

1. Give a complete dump of the nominations to the existing heroes. Yes, it's probably too much data for them to read, but it helps with transparency. Feel free to also share an abridged version as you have in the past, but at least make it possible for the selection committee to access the raw data for ALL nominations.

2. Rather than using a popular vote within the selection committee from a very small list, use a somewhat larger list and have Ruby Heroes vote YES / NO / UNDECIDED on whether they feel each person qualifies for the award. Set some sort of threshold for that, and then randomize the final selection from there. I

In the end, I still wonder if the award itself is something that has outlived its utility. But assuming we can agree to disagree on that, the point above might at least bring the selection process in line with its core goal of recognizing the under-appreciated developers among us.