<html><head><meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"><meta content="Group-Office 2.18" name="GENERATOR"></head><body><p>> 0.0001 karma point per line, or something?</p>
<p>G<br />
o<br />
o<br />
d<br />
<br />
i<br />
d<br />
e<br />
a<br />
.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>T.</p>
<p><br />
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<blockquote style="border-style: none none none solid; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color rgb(34, 67, 127); border-width: 0pt 0pt 0pt 2px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px;"><font face="verdana" size="2">----- Original Message -----<br />
<strong>Subject: </strong>Re: Reforming Karm<br />
<strong>From: </strong>Andrew Flegg <andrew@bleb.org><br />
<strong>To: </strong>"List for community development" <maemo-community@maemo.org><br />
<strong>Date: </strong>10/03/2008 2:07 am<br />
</font><br />
<br />
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Dave Neary <dneary@maemo.org> wrote:<br />
><br />
> I'm going to invoke Occam's Razor on some ideas (including some of my<br />
> own) having looked a bit furthher into how these things might get<br />
> implemented. I think we need to make a distinction between *really* easy<br />
> to do and *really* hard to do stuff, and favour easy over hard.<br />
<br />
:-)<br />
<br />
> Andrew Flegg wrote:<br />
><br />
>> I think there is a lot of community building, assistance and<br />
>> discussion on IRC. Therefore, it should (in some small way) be<br />
>> counted.<br />
><br />
> As I said, I'm sceptical, but that's beside the point. I was asking<br />
> "what would the IRC metric be?" - how do we measure it and award karma?<br />
> One suggestion by Eric Warnke was one point per month when your nick<br />
> joins the channel in the last year - but of course, that doesn't measure<br />
> participation.<br />
<br />
It also doesn't help for the many people who stay logged in all the<br />
time, and keep track of scrollback etc. Let's invoke Occam's Razor:<br />
<br />
* Someone "participates" in IRC when they say something.<br />
<br />
(There's a potentially better version which is when someone says<br />
something /to them/, but that's overcomplicating).<br />
<br />
Obviously, saying something is as easy as posting to a mailing list<br />
(well, easier) and can be just as valuable, or throw-away as a mailing<br />
list post. However, the people who say things regularly on IRC are, I<br />
think, contributing to the community (or a subset of it) more than<br />
someone who doesn't.<br />
<br />
* Let's give a *very* low karma score for every line someone says on IRC.<br />
<br />
The only problem here is people changing their nicks, hence the IRC<br />
field on someone's profile probably needs to handle comma-separated<br />
nicks (or we discourage changing nicks anyway).<br />
<br />
> Is there any place where we can get # of comments per<br />
> nick?<br />
<br />
http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-irclog/<br />
<br />
> How would we translate that to karma?<br />
<br />
0.0001 karma point per line, or something? Perhaps a log scale for<br />
those who have *way* too much time.<br />
<br />
Someone did some basic scraping and found the totals for the last year<br />
or something. I can't remember the numbers now, but lcuk was one of<br />
the highest with a few tens of thousands. lcuk *is* contributing to<br />
the platform (as the excitement about liqbase showed at the summit),<br />
but because his software isn't yet end-user ready - and, at the<br />
moment, is mostly about experimenting with getting the fastest<br />
performance out of the hardware - he is overlooked with the current<br />
karma system.<br />
<br />
> A karmabot that keeps count & updates the midgard database daily?<br />
<br />
That would be one approach. mgedmin's already doing it, though.<br />
<br />
>>> Some other modifications I would bring in are max and min points for<br />
>>> things like blog entries scores and products - I think for blogs the min<br />
>>> should be about 2 karma, the max about 10.<br />
>><br />
>> Doesn't this move to weighting the karma *solely* towards<br />
>> development(-process) tasks? Writing emails or blog posts can<br />
>> encourage change in the community, bring disparate activities together<br />
>> or coalesce a number of thoughts into a concrete plan.<br />
><br />
> Not solely, no. It merely limits the effects of blogs - if your blog<br />
> post gets 50 faves, you currently get 51 karma for that. If you maintain<br />
> a popular product, you get maybe 30 karma. I know which one took more<br />
> work...<br />
<br />
But that's a scaling factor. Introducing a maximum's saying "we value<br />
this contribution, but - once you've done it X times - you might as<br />
well stop".<br />
<br />
I'm all for weighting blog post faves much lower than product rankings<br />
etc; absolutely. I'm also willing to accept something on a square root<br />
or log scale to limit the effects of it at the higher end. I<br />
*disagree* with the concept of a maximum for any aspect of the karma<br />
system.<br />
<br />
<br />
> Currently it doesn't even include bugzilla opening & closing bugs, I<br />
> believe. Or wiki creates & edits. I think it should, and I think those<br />
> activities count as doing something productive.<br />
<br />
Absolutely. And, as Ryan says, also commenting on bugs (in fact pretty<br />
much *any* modification to Bugzilla should get you some positive<br />
karma); otherwise triagers and people helping diagnose problems aren't<br />
being told their contribution is valued.<br />
<br />
> I agree that talking has value - and I propose that we give it some<br />
> value - but I think that doing stuff has *more* value, and I want to<br />
> make sure Karma weights things appropriately.<br />
<br />
Again, 100% agreed. As I say, I don't like the idea of an arbitrary<br />
maximum, though. Weighting "harder" things more strongly than "easier"<br />
things should absolutely be the case.<br />
<br />
>>> For products, I would stop counting after 4 releases, which I think is a<br />
>>> nice balance between rewarding product maintainers, historical<br />
>>> participation and supporting older distributions on the one side, and<br />
>>> overpowering karma by over-weighting products in the case where they are<br />
>>> maintained for every single Maemo release.<br />
>><br />
>> Would it be better to do something like some of us discussed at the<br />
>> summit: karma elements have a half-life; if you released 3 version of<br />
>> a product for the 770, that *is* less valuable to the community today.<br />
>> This kind of arbitrary limit on the amount of karma you can earn seems<br />
>> like the wrong approach to me.<br />
><br />
> Actually, both of these propositions (mine & yours) would be<br />
> inordinately difficult to manage with the midgard database as it is.<br />
<br />
Good. The "4 releases" thing is just another aspect of arbitrary karma<br />
limits for some activities.<br />
<br />
> I like the half-life idea, I know that Eclipse uses something similar to<br />
> manage inactive committers (there it's binary obviously, but if you make<br />
> no commits in six months, or fewer than 3 over the previous year or so,<br />
> you can lose committer status). But I worry that if there's a lot of<br />
> work putting it into practice that it won't be a good investment.<br />
<br />
I don't know the midgard code, so if it's a lot of work to implement<br />
"fading" karma, we perhaps shouldn't do it. I think it's probably the<br />
best way of ensuring that no-one can hoard karma, and that people need<br />
to stay active in the community to maintain their karma level.<br />
<br />
For example, when karma was introduced it was suggested that it could<br />
be used to help determine who might get any future potential device<br />
programme discounts. a) this should favour people who are currently<br />
more active than were just *very* active 3 years ago; b) it should be<br />
possible to eye the top 50-100-200 karma ratings for any tweak and say<br />
"does this roughly look like the names I'd expect to see"?<br />
<br />
Cheers,<br />
<br />
Andrew<br />
<br />
-- <br />
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/<br />
maemo.org Community Council member<br />
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