[maemo-community] Developer devices & karma (was Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system)

[From: Sebastian 'CrashandDie' Lauwers]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> Still karma is relevant for other things like e.g. getting sponsored to
> events, becoming a betatester of unreleased software etc. The specific
> karma (e.g. bugs filed/commented) might become more and more relevant to
> help organizing focused activities (e.g. wiki karma for a documentation
> hackfest).

Thanks Quim.

Ryan, Randall, I really hope you're seeing I'm not trying to alienate
you guys on purpose (even though it was fairly late and I was still
fairly drunk).

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Randall Arnold <texrat at ovi.com> wrote
> Oh, and back to real life: in a workforce, we are rated against each other
> even when direct comparisons are invalid.  I'm entering one such review
> process right now with my employer.  It's flawed, but I'm stuck with it

Randall, yes, Performance Reviews suck, but the difference is that
unless you're the boss, you have to go through with them. Here, we can
actually discuss it.

> "Better arguments" includes not just tearing down the status quo with
> personal opinions but in offering viable alternatives.

I tried to point that out. I'll try to be less eloquent and more
straightforward.

This Summit, what metric was used to elect the people who would get
the "Fixed in Fremantle" t-shirt? Was it not only based upon personal
knowledge of those involved, and little statistical data, coming only
from bugzilla? That seemed to work pretty well, because we asked the
experts to elect the experts. We didn't ask someone with no prior
understanding of bugzilla as a whole to interpret numbers displayed on
a webpage; correct me if I'm mistaken, but this is perfect.

During the London meetup, be it for ODZ or Flagship-store event, did
we look at karma to see what members to contact to provide some
contents during the evening? Of course not, people dug in their
memories and thought, "Well maybe that lcuk guy can show something
cool, and Jaffa is always up for free drinks". (apologies for the
stereotypes)

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:57 AM, Ryan Abel <rabelg5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> To that end, I think this community is growing past the point where we can
> expect one person (Quim) or a group of people (the Council) to have enough
> knowledge about the whole community to make judgements like that like they
> may have been able to in the past.

Agreed. However, whenever an organisation becomes too big, most people
tend to chop it up and lay it about again. The council was a great
idea, that I think nobody can doubt. Now, for example, we could put a
recommendation that the council should be formed by: one person with a
lot of exposure to the dev community (or two), one who has a lot of
exposure to documentation and discussions, etc, etc. Each "section" of
the community would have its own set of statistics (as was explained
in my first email), and based or aided on those numbers, the council
member who has a better knowledge of a specific environment could make
the calls or recommendations (or the specialised member makes the
recommendation, and the other members confirm based on the numbers,
whatever).

What I'm trying to explain is that personal preference will always be
more important than raw numbers, so why try to ignore that fact? Let's
embrace it.

And Randall, sorry for the hairsplitting:

This is exactly how real life works. You have a job, if you have a
good relationship with your boss, or another manager, you can prove
you are good at talking with customers, or you can demonstrate your
development efforts. By doing so, you'll get the promotions and raises
faster. If however you're in the back of the server room, eating
crisps and wearing the same t-shirt all year through, and have no form
of social interaction excepted the funny email you send out on
Tuesdays, then how can you expect getting any rewards?

Sure it's not fair, but who said life ever was?

PS: Randall, your email client doesn't cut lines at the recommended 80
character limit. File a bug ;)

--
question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
     -- Wm. Shakespeare