[maemo-community] Quick stats on voter lists

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 7:46 AM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Henri Bergius
>> <henri.bergius at nemein.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> For the latter point, it would be a good idea if people post
>>> enhancement requests on needed karma calculation plugins to bugzilla.
>>> I would be more than happy to implement more of them. At least ITT
>>> integration has been discussed, and is in the "100 days" plan.
>>
>> We had a bit of chat about it on IRC last night, including making IRC
>> count towards the score:
>
> I'm against counting IRC as an "activity" in maemo.org. In my
> experience, IRC is an inactivity.
>

I'm very much disagreed here.

Mailing list postings aren't really all that more relevant months
later than IRC discussions, and a lot of good stuff happens on IRC
that can't happen in the same way in a less "live" medium like the
lists. Helping new users (turning a disgruntled user into a happy,
potentially contributing, one seems like a fairly good way to
contribute to the community), coordinating projects (adv-backlight
wouldn't be anywhere near where it is now without IRC—in fact, it
wouldn't even exist!), connecting people (I know I wouldn't have
gotten together with lcuk to help him create a—not yet live—website
for liqbase), getting people involved (I wouldn't be involved with
bugzilla at all if it weren't for timeless's prodding, coaching and
advice), and general community building (while discussion off-topic
stuff isn't _directly_ relevant, the people aspect that it helps
foster can't be discounted).

A lot about Maemo wouldn't be what it is now without IRC, and the
major IRC contributors are some of the most underrepresented people on
the karma listing. Although your _personal_ experience with IRC may
lead you to believe that it isn't an important contribution to the
community (what's more important than the community-building that goes
on in IRC everyday, says I!), _my_ personal experience it's one of the
more important aspects of a healthy community.

IRC as a contribution should certainly not be weighted as highly as
bug submission or wiki edits, but it certainly shouldn't be dismissed
out-of-hand.