[maemo-community] Sprint task: Refine the karma system

[From: Anderson Lizardo]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Valerio Valerio <vdv100 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey,

Hi,

> My second task for this month is about the karma system[1], as discussed
> 'doers' should earn more karma than 'talkers'[2], the current system is very
> broken IMO.

First of all, I must confess I never cared much about the karma
system. But I've been noticing the importance being given to it, to
the point that it is becoming part of some important Maemo community
decisions (like who to give device discounts or IRC cloaks). It
somehow looks to me that it will never be perfect (and maybe not be
close to this), because it is difficult to distinguish whether some
contribution most "important" than other totally unrelated one. E.g.
is documentation more relevant/important/worthy than development? And
QA? And user support?

Another problem with karma is that by itself it looks like a "quality"
metric, but it in fact measures quantity most of the time (e.g. number
of blog posts, instead of their quality and relevance). It is possible
to make it a more quality related metric by taking human feedback into
consideration (like number of comments to the post, or ping backs, or
size of a forum thread), but it makes calculation more complex.

> Here is a proposal based in previous discussion and proposed improvements:
> [...]

I don't see any mentions of the Maemo Wiki, and IMHO it is where the
best community produced documentation should be.

Other things that even the old karma calculation did not contemplate:

* Development teams composed of more the one person. How to provide
karma for each one? Only for the uploader? Maybe create a "team karma"
?
* Developers of enabler applications (i.e. the ones not listed as user
applications but that allow to write them, e.g. libraries and
bindings). These applications currently are not being voted through
the QA, thus are not getting any thumbs up/down.

My (very own) two cents,
-- 
Anderson Lizardo