[maemo-community] Election process referendum

[From: Benson Mitchell]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Markus Schneider <markus.schn at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Dave Neary wrote:
>
> > For the last election, at 10, we would have included about 1000
> > maemo.org accounts, at 25 we would have included about 450.
>
> Very interesting. So it is actually at least 1/2 of the ~900 people that
> voted last time who would not be allowed to vote with the karma limit of
> 25?! (Of course the karma rating has changed now, but still...)
>
No, that means half of them would not have been allowed to vote; I was among
them, and if itT wasn't included, still would be, as I have 16 non-itT karma
ATM. But, if itT wasn't to be included, I'd have gone out and made some
karma elsewise some time ago. Since most (I think?) participants in the
election last time were aware they'd need karma for the next one, I'd have
expected most of them to react similarly. (But I'm seemingly wrong.)

The difference between the 10 and 25 numbers, BTW, is only 225 itT posts, or
rather less posts and some thanks. (I don't know the thanks formula...)

As it stands, though, the current tally of accounts with karma >=25 is just
598, so it seems like most of the voters from the last election either don't
know or don't care about the karma limit for the upcoming election. (Unless
there are more karma sources coming online, and they're loafing while
counting on those to boost them, as I did with itT... so are there other
sources slated to come online before the election?)

Please be so kind and tell us the exact number of actual active voters with
> a karma >25 from the last election to see how the real ratio is then. And
> what the ratio would be with a limit of 10.
>
> I don't like the notion of sentencing someone to a day fighting with an
(apparently evil) database for my curiosity, but those data are starting to
look important...

And dropping the karma to 10 might be worth looking at, too.

> I think there's an argument to be made that 25 might be too high, but
> > let's get more up to date figures before we close that discussion. I
> > think 100 would definitely be too high. And given what you say
> > afterwards, I think that you think this too.
>
> Well it really depends on what the definition of "Maemo Community" is. If
> only real contributors are considered part of the community, 100 seems
> reasonable and it also would make (massive) fraud nearly impossible.
>

100 limits us to only 204 ATM. And at a glance, it seems it might exclude
quite many, if not most, one-project developers, to say nothing of honest
non-developer participants. (Garage has 780 projects ATM, and many devs
don't use garage.) A quick skim turned up several names I recognized,
including andrewfblack, andrewgodwin, gene_cash, kernelpanic, madman2k,
penguinbait, and tim_edmonds; setting the bar at 100 qualifies these all as
non-contributors, and probably many more I didn't recognize. To be sure,
there's no level where you can be sure to include *all* relevant people, but
I think we can do a lot better than this.

A question: Is there code (or documentation) available somewhere concerning
all the karma formulas? I'd like to look at what various "prototype" users
would need to reach various thresholds. I already know a thankless itT
poster would need 625, but there are many others...

Benson
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