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"Meritocracy" is not a real concept of how to run a community, but rather a satirical term used to lampoon the idea that "merit" is a 1-dimensional concept which can be measured linearly and used to judge people and rank them. The term was invented as satire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Thinking that it's a good idea is like what happened with "waterfall" development. Someone described all the problems with what big companies were doing, and then someone else picked up that description of all the problems and said "ooh! all the big companies are doing this! this must be a great way to do things!" and then everyone perpetuated that disaster for the next two decades.

The fact that "hacker" culture has uncritically picked up on "meritocracy" and doesn't realize it's a snarky joke about unfairness says a lot about the unbelievably sheltered and privileged position that most people reading this site enjoy, and our collective lack of social skills. By "social skills" I don't just mean, like, how to behave at parties, but also how to manage groups and how to be aware of the perspectives of other people.

Not to mention the fact that if your open source community isn't measuring merit on an objective, defined-in-advance, linear scale, with measures in place, then you are not even practicing the (unfair, broken) system of "meritocracy", you're just doing "rule by cognitive bias" ("biasocracy"? surely nobody is going to take that term and think it's a worthy goal to aspire to).

You can trust me, because my community _does_ practice objective, quantitative meritocracy, and therefore I am provably the best and most deserving person in this conversation: https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/

[edleafe]

Symphony orchestras used to claim to be the equivalent of a 'meritocracy' (don't think that they used that term, though). They selected strictly by audition, relying on the ears of the (male) conductor/director, and less than 10% of the musicians selected were women. When they changed to have the musicians perform behind a screen, and without identifying them by name, the number of women selected increased dramatically.

A similar dynamic happens in the tech world. The people determining 'merit' have that same built-in bias against females, and will judge their work as lower than it should be. The bias need not be conscious, and in most cases the men think that they are being fair and honest, but it's there.

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This exact example features in the blog post draft I copied most of my comment from :-).

Even more pernicious than that though - you say "the men think they are being fair and honest", but research repeatedly shows that women are also less fair to other women. This is important to keep in mind because it reinforces the fact that most of the biases that work against objectively determining merit are part of the fabric of our society. They are biases that you will tend to hold even if they hurt you personally.

Many men bristle when they are confronted with this sort of research and say "I'm not a sexist" or "I'm not a racist". That's the wrong way to think about it. We live in a deeply unfair society, and unless we constantly, mindfully, consciously work against that unfairness all the time, we will fall victim to it ourselves and perpetuate it.

[vezzy-fnord]

That the term was coined in a satirical context does not mean the concept it describes is in any way discredited by default. The semiotics behind ideas are constantly evolving in any event.