Consider renaming this repository

[RichardLitt]

The recent rOpenSci newsletter has this paragraph:

Give Thanks with the allcontributors Package
Mark Padgham published a blog post about his allcontributors package, which provides a very easy way to acknowledge all contributions to your software.

As the blogpost notes, this is not the same as all-contributors:

Before describing how it works, and why we think you should use it, it is important to note that, unlike the truly general allcontributors.org system, rOpenSci’s allcontributors R package can only acknowledge contributions that are recorded in the git log of a repository, or via GitHub interactions. This effectively reduces the 33 different kinds of contributions in the former system down to a much smaller subset, excluding the kinds of contributions not likely to appear in actual commits or issue comments, such as planning, finances, or general organisational tasks.

It's great that you're interested in building a tool that automatically thanks contributors. However, allcontributors is a really confusing name for what has been built here. It doesn't follow the https://allcontributors.org spec, in that it doesn't allow you to thank contributors who don't commit code or interact with GitHub. It also uses the same name - allcontributors from rOpenSci is exactly the same as allcontributors.org; removing the hyphen doesn't make it clear that this is really different.

I would encourage you to change the name to something else entirely. As a user interested in thanking people who don't code, I was confused that this package was only for a subset, and more confused that it uses a similar name. I don't think this is the best move.

[mpadge]

Thanks for the feedback @RichardLitt, which I will definitely consider. As a first step, I've written to the maintainers of allcontributors.org to seek their views on this issue, and also ping them here: @jakebolam, @Berkmann18, @tbenning, and @sinchang.

The two important points I raised there and repeat here are that:

1. This work was only ever intended to enhance,prioritise, and encourage broader use of the allcontributors.org system; and
2. Renaming this package to something distinctly different would, in my opinion, imply some form of intention to carve out a distinct space, an act itself at least partly indistinguishable from wilful competition. I strive for the exact opposite of that; I wish at all times to acknowledge the primacy of allcontributors.org, and still believe the naming and explicit acknowledgement throughout of the primacy of that system to be a better way of achieving this.

I see allcontributors.org above all else as a public schema. There are many instances of public schemas with software implementations which directly carry and inherit identical name, for example the many "RDF" packages which implement the RDF schema, or Simple Features pacakges which implement the Simple Features schema. This package was named in exactly that spirit. Implementations in this sense strive to be as true to an underlying schema as possible, yet always inherit a degree of unavoidable interpretation, for example due to particularities of the computer languages or systems in which they are implemented.

A proposal

In my opinion, the next step forward would and should be to seek input from the maintainers of allcontributors.org on how other people can best help develop alternative implementations of their schema, and on what (minimal?) requirements or standards for any alternative implementations might be. I'm confident that anybody motivated to develop and maintain a magnanimous scheme like allcontributors.org would also consider it more important to encourage alignment of alternative implementations, rather than discourage that through enforcing renaming, an act which could only serve to splinter any coherence in the broader endeavour of increasing gratitude in the world.

I think more productive ways forward would be:

1. Begin discussions on minimal compliance requirements or the like for alternative implementations of what is effectively a public schema above all else.
2. Standardise alternative ways to acknowledge contributors not directly traceable through git logs or GitHub issues
3. Encourage the development of tools which work easily beyond GitHub alone (on Codeberg, GitLab, SourceHut, and whereever else), and discuss how to generalise tools and workflows to move beyond GitHub alone.

(And also note that although the current workflow here only admits a subset of the full attribution enabled by allcontributors.org, extension would be very straightforward, but hasn't been implemented mainly because nobody has yet requested such extension.)

Happy to discuss further with you here, but I will definitely prefer to wait for feedback from the allcontritors.org team, and will be hoping that we can mutually advance and align our projects 👍

[RichardLitt]

Standardise alternative ways to acknowledge contributors not directly traceable through git logs or GitHub issues

This would be the best move. My questions around the name stem from the fact that I've been in many spaces where the best contributors are not those who commit code, and only taking into account commits isn't thanking them - which I see as the point of all contributors and the reason for the name in the first place. Only thanking people who make "tangible contributions" is not in the spirit of that goal.

Thanks for considering this. I know it's a knee-jerk reaction from someone you haven't seen before.

[mpadge]

@RichardLitt As said, that is all fairly straightforward to implement. There'd be a number of possible ways, but I'll wait first to see whether any of the .org team have anything to say here.