Hi, On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Andrew Flegg <[email protected]> wrote: > However, you're right about the cost aspect: a lot of investment has > produced a (IMHO, technically sub-optimal) implementation for > maemo.org. The hours billed to that from Nemein et al could've paid > for a few more sponsorship slots, I guess.
I don't think you've quite understood the agreement there. We (and others) have been contracted by Nokia to do various maintenance and development tasks for maemo.org. The decisions on *what* and *how* have always been made by either Nokia (in the early days) or the Maemo community and the council representing it (more recently). If you think some things we've done within those contracts is not valuable then it would be best to look at the Sprint meetings where those tasks have been agreed on. In the case of Karma we were requested to build a system for quantifying various contributions by maemo.org community members, and to calculate a general "karma value" on those. The system mostly works on weighted quantities of different contributions (number of wiki edits, number of bugs reported), but in the areas where we have information on the quality of those contributions (blog posts, Maemo applications in Downloads) we also take the quality into consideration when calculating the scores. The Karma algorithm has always been out in the open, both in the sense that all software related to it is open source developed in public repositories, and in the sense that the algorithm has been debated openly, and the last couple of iterations have actually been designed by the Council instead of us or Nokia. Obviously a computer cannot know everything of the worth of a person's community involvement, but I think the current Karma system gives a quite fair overview, as evidenced by the list in http://maemo.org/profile/list/ As for the question of whether a Karma system is useful or not: the point of a Karma system is to help identify the people who are doing hard work for a community but are maybe not making so much noise about themselves. If you don't have any metrics in place, then the people visible to the community tend to be the ones who are always writing on the mailing lists, the forums and the IRC channel, not necessarily the ones actually keeping the community going, the ones doing the "boring but necessary" stuff. Meritocracy, as Attila wrote earlier. But whether maemo.org's Karma system would serve the aims of the MeeGo community depends greatly how the MeeGo community wants to be like. > Andrew /Henri -- Henri Bergius Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software http://bergie.iki.fi/ Skype: henribergius Jabber: [email protected] Microblog: http://www.qaiku.com/home/bergie/ My Royal Enfield Bullet 500 is for sale, see http://www.nettimoto.com/844397 _______________________________________________ Meego-community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community
