Hi, Adding my 2cents to the discussion. I originally favoured the idea of karma as it gives feedback to contributors about how they are doing, and provides a certain incentive to contribute. However, I am swayed by the arguments of Dave and Quim on this one: why try to compress everything into one single number that will almost certainly not reflect reality and hide relevant information?
I agree with Dave and Quim: what we have right now is a "sort of" multi-dimensional karma that can be used to identify key contributors, and (more importantly) highlight the areas where they contribute - much more useful in terms of deciding sponsorship to certain conferences, free prototypes, t-shirts etc. Ronan. ________________________________________________ Meego Developer Advocate (Nokia), Helsinki >Hi, > >Quick reminder: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=126 > >Graham Cobb wrote: >> That is true. On the other hand, not having karma is really no better! >If >> there are benefits to be handed out (sponsorships, free devices, etc.) >then >> that will result in "rewarding some people's contributions, but not >others" >> even if there is no karma. At least with a karma system, people know >where >> they stand: they can (and certainly will) moan about the karma system >but no >> one can accuse you and Quim of favouritism or of slighting some people >> unfairly. > >So - let's see how this would play out in reality: > >Tommy is a developer, working upstream on Upstart. His effort is >invisible to the MeeGo community, unless his baby is being git cloned >into MeeGo's gitorious (but then, wasn't it said that MeeGo would be >just integrating whatever was released by upstream?) > >Alan would like to attend the summit to talk to MeeGo kernel developers >about issues they've been having with Upstart. > >Bob is an active forum member. He would like to attend the summit to >meet other active forum members, and to talk about MeeGo to some >developers, to explain the things he'd like to see happen in the >platform. > >Carl is passionate about mobile UX development, and as soon as it was >available, started hacking on the handset UX, adding cool features, >fixing bugs, porting and packaging his favourite apps, generally making >himself useful. Carl doesn't like forums, and isn't a big fan of mailing >lists either, he just commits code & comments in Bugzilla. > >Bob shows up in karma, Alan doesn't. Carl also shows up in karma, but >might have more or less karma than Bob. > >All three apply for sponsorship, and in the "Involvement in the MeeGo >community" section, Alan links to the upstream Upstart changelog, and >maybe a couple of meego-dev mailing lists. Bob points to the "Most >active forum members" ranking list which will be up there on meego. Carl >points to the handset UX gitorious log, the Bugzilla activity list and >the "most active packagers" list. > >Perhaps they all get sponsorship, perhaps not. But do you honestly think >that anyone evaluating their request would have trouble evaluating their >relative involvement? > >> In my view, it isn't the karma that causes the problems in the >community, it >> is what you do with it. And, karma does provide an incentive for >people to >> contribute -- earning karma helps people to feel valued by the >community. >> And it provides a way to recognise people for jobs which have to be >done but >> which are not exciting (bug triaging, QA testing, writing unit tests, >Wiki >> tidying, etc). > >You would have the top bug triagists, the top QA testers, the top unit >test writers, the top wiki editors, etc. Why try to merge everything >into one, when each stands on its own merits? > >To take the analogy of baseball stats - you don't try to merge the >various stats you can get (hits, bases, catches, home runs, etc, etc) >into one figure to get the "best" baseball player, you evaluate what you >need at a position, and then pick someone who does well in the criteria >that are important for that position. > >Cheers, >Dave. > > >_______________________________________________ >Meego-community mailing list >[email protected] >http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community _______________________________________________ Meego-community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community
