[maemo-community] Reforming Karm

[From: Tim]

	> 0.0001 karma point per line, or something? 

	G
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	;) 

	T. 
 ---
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 ----- Original Message -----
 Subject: Re: Reforming Karm
 From:  Andrew Flegg 
 To: "List for community development" 
 Date: 10/03/2008 2:07 am
 On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Dave Neary  wrote:
 >
 > I'm going to invoke Occam's Razor on some ideas (including some of
my
 > own) having looked a bit furthher into how these things might get
 > implemented. I think we need to make a distinction between
*really* easy
 > to do and *really* hard to do stuff, and favour easy over hard.
 :-)
 > Andrew Flegg wrote:
 >
 >> I think there is a lot of community building, assistance and
 >> discussion on IRC. Therefore, it should (in some small way) be
 >> counted.
 >
 > As I said, I'm sceptical, but that's beside the point. I was
asking
 > "what would the IRC metric be?" - how do we measure it and award
karma?
 > One suggestion by Eric Warnke was one point per month when your
nick
 > joins the channel in the last year - but of course, that doesn't
measure
 > participation.
 It also doesn't help for the many people who stay logged in all the
 time, and keep track of scrollback etc. Let's invoke Occam's Razor:
 * Someone "participates" in IRC when they say something.
 (There's a potentially better version which is when someone says
 something /to them/, but that's overcomplicating).
 Obviously, saying something is as easy as posting to a mailing list
 (well, easier) and can be just as valuable, or throw-away as a
mailing
 list post. However, the people who say things regularly on IRC are,
I
 think, contributing to the community (or a subset of it) more than
 someone who doesn't.
 * Let's give a *very* low karma score for every line someone says on
IRC.
 The only problem here is people changing their nicks, hence the IRC
 field on someone's profile probably needs to handle comma-separated
 nicks (or we discourage changing nicks anyway).
 > Is there any place where we can get # of comments per
 > nick?
 http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-irclog/
 > How would we translate that to karma?
 0.0001 karma point per line, or something? Perhaps a log scale for
 those who have *way* too much time.
 Someone did some basic scraping and found the totals for the last
year
 or something. I can't remember the numbers now, but lcuk was one of
 the highest with a few tens of thousands. lcuk *is* contributing to
 the platform (as the excitement about liqbase showed at the summit),
 but because his software isn't yet end-user ready - and, at the
 moment, is mostly about experimenting with getting the fastest
 performance out of the hardware - he is overlooked with the current
 karma system.
 > A karmabot that keeps count & updates the midgard database daily?
 That would be one approach. mgedmin's already doing it, though.
 >>> 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.
 >
 > Not solely, no. It merely limits the effects of blogs - if your
blog
 > post gets 50 faves, you currently get 51 karma for that. If you
maintain
 > a popular product, you get maybe 30 karma. I know which one took
more
 > work...
 But that's a scaling factor. Introducing a maximum's saying "we
value
 this contribution, but - once you've done it X times - you might as
 well stop".
 I'm all for weighting blog post faves much lower than product
rankings
 etc; absolutely. I'm also willing to accept something on a square
root
 or log scale to limit the effects of it at the higher end. I
 *disagree* with the concept of a maximum for any aspect of the karma
 system.
 > Currently it doesn't even include bugzilla opening & closing bugs,
I
 > believe. Or wiki creates & edits. I think it should, and I think
those
 > activities count as doing something productive.
 Absolutely. And, as Ryan says, also commenting on bugs (in fact
pretty
 much *any* modification to Bugzilla should get you some positive
 karma); otherwise triagers and people helping diagnose problems
aren't
 being told their contribution is valued.
 > I agree that talking has value - and I propose that we give it
some
 > value - but I think that doing stuff has *more* value, and I want
to
 > make sure Karma weights things appropriately.
 Again, 100% agreed. As I say, I don't like the idea of an arbitrary
 maximum, though. Weighting "harder" things more strongly than
"easier"
 things should absolutely be the case.
 >>> 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.
 >
 > Actually, both of these propositions (mine & yours) would be
 > inordinately difficult to manage with the midgard database as it
is.
 Good. The "4 releases" thing is just another aspect of arbitrary
karma
 limits for some activities.
 > I like the half-life idea, I know that Eclipse uses something
similar to
 > manage inactive committers (there it's binary obviously, but if
you make
 > no commits in six months, or fewer than 3 over the previous year
or so,
 > you can lose committer status). But I worry that if there's a lot
of
 > work putting it into practice that it won't be a good investment.
 I don't know the midgard code, so if it's a lot of work to implement
 "fading" karma, we perhaps shouldn't do it. I think it's probably
the
 best way of ensuring that no-one can hoard karma, and that people
need
 to stay active in the community to maintain their karma level.
 For example, when karma was introduced it was suggested that it
could
 be used to help determine who might get any future potential device
 programme discounts. a) this should favour people who are currently
 more active than were just *very* active 3 years ago; b) it should
be
 possible to eye the top 50-100-200 karma ratings for any tweak and
say
 "does this roughly look like the names I'd expect to see"?
 Cheers,
 Andrew
 -- 
 Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
 maemo.org Community Council member
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