[maemo-community] Explaining karma

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi all,

I asked Henri for some more details about karma, given the reactions
concerning using it as a criteria for being an eligible voter.

He's best place to answer any follow-up questions, but here's the long &
short of it...

We measure karma by counting stuff, and multiplying the stuff by a
weighting factor.

The stuff we count is:

* Blog posts
* Favourites
* Comments
* Mailing list discussion on maemo-users and maemo-developers
* Interacting with the website - favourites & burys
* Owning products in garage
* Being part of garage groups
* Opening new bugs

The multipliers used are in this config file between lines 170 and 185:
http://trac.midgard-project.org/browser/trunk/midcom/net.nehmer.account/config/config.inc

Singling out products: a product is ranked 1 + its average star rating
("price"), multiplied by the product modifier (4). Thus, our current
pearl "MaemoPad+" has an average star rating of around 4.5, giving a
karma weighting of 22 to its author, disq.

I can't explain how disq has 220 product points, or why Kagu appears 3
times in his profile and Maemopad+ twice. I think this is just a bug.

Of course there are problems with karma. I don't know exactly which
comments are counted, and discussion points and comments points seem low
for a project that's been around for so long.

Some people have said in https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2481
that their contributions haven't been counted fully, and we should of
course ensure that the karma plug-in is working if we're going to use it
for anything more serious than giving unofficial kudos to people.

There are some other issues with karma - this is something of a list:
https://bugs.maemo.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=karma


But at the end, the criteria we need to put in place for the election
are simple - it takes no effort to create a maemo account, and we should
make sure that the community council are representing people who have
put some effort into being part of the Maemo community. Currently, karma
is the best measure we have of activity in the Maemo community
(although, as jott pointed out, this is representative only of a subset
of possible activities). I'm open to other suggestions.

If you have any questions on the karma measurement, or inconsistencies
in your karma count that you'd like to point out, please reply to the
list here.

Cheers,
Dave.


-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org