[python-advocacy] Thought: Using LinkedIn to reward open-source developers

[Tennessee Leeuwenburg]

I've been using LinkedIn to leave positive reviews of some of the best and
most professional contributors to The Python Papers. It occurs to me that
the same mechanism could apply equally well to other open-source projects.
I'm not 100% sure how much value LinkedIn comments would have in a job
interview, but my guess is that an increasing amount. Certainly I'd take
them seriously if I was employing someone. I'd definitely check out their
profile.

Also, I wonder if anyone feels like writing some software to calculate a
"Guido number" (e.g. Bacon number, Erdos number). It might be kind of cool
and fun for people to list their Guide number on their blog / website
whatever. Just a thought as a promotional tool.

As a result of my post a while back about encouraging Pythoneers to link to
eachother on LinkedIn, I have definitely increased my own connectedness. I
presume at least some others have done the same (indeed, I know so). I'm not
sure how to calculate the "connectedness" of the Python community using this
facility, however. If I had the data myself, I could easily calculate the
average number of links held by someone in a Python community, or compare
the the number of internal links / total community size vs other
communities. If anyone here is a LinkedIn Guru, it would be fantastic to
hear about whether this is possible.

Alternatively, we could pursue our own linking mechanism using OpenID or
similar.

Cheers,
-Tennessee
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