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

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Jan 12, 2010, at 7:33 PM, Sebastian 'CrashandDie' Lauwers wrote:

> Now, I'm not a big supporter of karma at all. I believe it is a flawed
> system which encourages cheating and ego-trips, and neither of those
> have citizenship in this community.

Well, for me, I like it because I enjoy a little bit of fun  
competition. timeless passed me in bugzilla karma recently and it  
encouraged me to file a long slew of bugs that had been slowly  
building up in my backlog. Bugs that would've festered there for a  
while longer if not for the karma encouragement.

A karma system is never going to be perfect (heck, it's unlikely to  
even be GOOD) at measuring useful contribution. Which is, of course,  
why it shouldn't be used as the sole decider in any situation (that it  
was used as the sole decider for the DDP program was very unfortunate,  
although I can understand how much time it saved). However, despite  
its perceived evils, it can and does encourage useful contribution.