[maemo-community] Reforming Karm (was: Re: About ITt collaboration tasks)

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> I'm not sure where in the scheme of things itT would fit, perhaps you
> can make a suggestion. Also, if someone has a suggestion of a metric for
> IRC, I'm all ears (but remain sceptical of its usefulness as a metric of
> participation).

I think there is a lot of community building, assistance and
discussion on IRC. Therefore, it should (in some small way) be
counted.

> I have a feeling that things that are more talking than doing should be
> measured on a square root scale - if you write 25 emails to a mailing
> list, and that gets you 5 karma, then 80 mails should get you 9 karma
> (we don't want to encourage people to be only writing email IMHO).
>
> Some other modifications I would bring in are max and min points for
> things like blog entries scores and products - I think for blogs the min
> should be about 2 karma, the max about 10.

Doesn't this move to weighting the karma *solely* towards
development(-process) tasks? Writing emails or blog posts can
encourage change in the community, bring disparate activities together
or coalesce a number of thoughts into a concrete plan.

*Doing* something isn't the only thing of value, and the (possibly
only) good thing the current karma system has is /not/ focusing purely
on development-process issues like opening/closing bugs in Bugzilla,
or shipping a product.

> For products, I would stop counting after 4 releases, which I think is a
> nice balance between rewarding product maintainers, historical
> participation and supporting older distributions on the one side, and
> overpowering karma by over-weighting products in the case where they are
> maintained for every single Maemo release.

Would it be better to do something like some of us discussed at the
summit: karma elements have a half-life; if you released 3 version of
a product for the 770, that *is* less valuable to the community today.
This kind of arbitrary limit on the amount of karma you can earn seems
like the wrong approach to me.

HTH,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member