How Work Is Ranked

The score favours value, and a person's minutes discount it. Everything else only nudges.

The score

1. Base value is the item's value squared, times the road milestone's factor and a confidence factor. The milestone factors are 1 for weight 1, 1.25 for weight 2 and 1.5 for weight 3.
2. Human discount is 1 / (1 + minutes / 30).
3. An item that unblocks others gets a quarter of their combined base value, up to its own base value.
4. Age adds 2% per day, up to 30%.
5. An item that needs a machine gets 10% more when a matching machine is idle.

The ranker shows its reasons. This is a value 5 item on a weight 3 milestone, with 30 human minutes:

   "score": 18.75,
   "class": "worth-the-ask",
   "why": [
    "value 5 -> 37.5",
    "human 30 min x0.50"
   ],

A value 2 item with no human cost:

   "score": 4.0,
   "class": "filler",
   "why": [
    "value 2 -> 4",
    "human 0 min x1.00"
   ],

What defers an item

A ready item is held back from the ranking when any of these is true:

• Its lane is closed by a missing plugin.
• Something that blocks it is not done.
• Its value is under the profile's min_value (default 2), unless it was answered or is an owner note.
• It needs a person whose review queue is at review_cap (default 3), unless it was answered.

Caps on housekeeping

Lane kinds maintenance and meta have default shares of 20% and 10%, measured over the last 10 claims. A lane's share_cap overrides them.