[maemo-community] [Proposal] - Developers should get karma based on the relevance of their software

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

David Greaves wrote:
> nb The very idea of discussing developer- related things on t.m.o.
> rather than the dev ml seems somewhat odd to me. 

In defense of forums:

Forums and mailing lists are good for different things.

The normal forum use-case is come in, don't read any history, ask a
question, get notified when other people post to the forum thread, get
an answer, you're done.

Low committment, and information is not persistent.

For enthusiasts interested in helping, come in, browse threads, spot a
few questions you can answer in the latest threads, answer them, done.

For forum active users, I guess the use-case changes to: Come in, skim
threads, select half a dozen that look interesting in forums you follow,
post to them, get notified when answer get made on them, repeat the day
after. I'd be very surprised to learn that anyone other than perhaps
Quim, Reggie and Roger follow all of the threads that are created on tmo.

Mailing lists, in the other hand, favour persistent data and batch
processing. There is an expectation of people subscribed to mailing
lists that they read everything (at least, mail headers). People save
interesting threads for later. Archives are searchable, browsable, and
serve as reference for past discussion. If you work on something where
you need hours straight of concentration, email is better. You download
all your mail when you want, read it when you want, answer questions
when you want. And ignore it when you want.

If people discuss important things with long-term decisions being made
on tmo, then the same expectation will apply there - and that takes, in
my mind, too much commitment.

It's easy to imagine coming back from 4 weeks holidays & catching up
with maemo-community & maemo-devel. It'd take a few of days, but it's
possible.  Imagine coming back from 2 or 4 weeks holiday and having to
catch up with all the important threads on tmo. Impossible!

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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