[heliodor]

When you start measuring things, people start gaming them, so for github's sake I hope your project disappears into oblivion.

Klout is the latest major sad example of this phenomenon. People are modifying their Twitter behavior in some fascinating ways to game their Klout score.

However, people love shortcuts, so I'm sure you can refine your service and subscribe clueless HR folks to it.

[foobar2k]

I don't think that means people should not measure things, if we didn't measure things we would never improve.

[shaggyfrog]

Measuring things would be one thing (number of repositories, number of pull requests sent, number of changes committed, number of comments made). I think the concern comes with boiling down a bunch of (possibly unknown) measurements into a single number. Who is to say that the formula is the "right" one or the "best" one? And what happens when people start getting ranked in an absolute sense based on that score?

And if people start changing their behaviour because they're gaming the system (or is it the system that gamed them?), and that results in unintended consequences, do we (as a whole) come out ahead from where we started?