Assessment and Evaluation

In FLOSS communities the code is evaluated in terms of its effectiveness and neatness. There is no formal assessment though of the learning that takes place. This is very different from education, where most of the activity is focused on formal assessment.

In this page you should contribute your experience of how assessment and evaluation takes place in FLOSS communities, and the type of measures, formal and informal, that are used to judge someone's status or contribution. For example, how does someone gain status in a community? How is code assessed as being worthy of integration into the core? When is someone's opinion valued highly? How are resolutions resolved?