This seems like a nice recipe for a big popularity contest with lots of inner-circle self-congratulation.

We've discussed the member levels issue a number of times in the past. Problem is, the brackets are a constantly moving target and somebody's always going to have an issue with whatever titles are picked. Better to just throw the raw numbers up there.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Elaborating further what I wrote in a similar thread some months ago, the time Nokia or another big company decides to disseminate free or loaned devices to a certain population, there must be a solid reason for it. Might be stimulating devs, arousing buzz in the blogosphere, rewarding aficionados... name it, whatever, but I think that every generous action like that has a lot of reasoning and money talk behind. And it must be so.
Now that there are going to be severak stakeholders in the meego arena, I think more then ever than a detailed, analytic measure of several contribution types might be optimal, when it comes to disseminating free or cheap devices,inviting to conferences or seminars, or simply giving immaterial rewards.
I.e. Nokia could choose to loan a device to top-ranking devs, or invite top-ranking bloggers at a vodka-and-reindeer meat party; LG could choose to give free devices to top social contributors in the forum, Samsung to top-rated trolls and so on.
Community can choose to aggregate a composite value from the several single variables according to a consensus formula, call it karma, and show it on the forum.
And everybody wins :)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

The Karma system works in giving a sense of progress and quantifying actions to the users much like how experience and stats increase works in motivating RPG players :)

(Well ok, there are lots of real businesses that make use of similar incentive systems too for both the benefit of the worker and the company.)

I don't think we should take that element away.

As for what to do with the points and how much each actions are weighted, that's the elements that need to be tweaked further to align it to what the community needs.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I'll just chime in my $0.02 - Karma is fun because it gives me a number to look at and see if people like what I do :D.

Other than that.. couldn't care less. And don't really do anything just to get karma, either.

I do think some form of community indicator should be kept that shows heavy contributors. I also think it should start at 0... it's a new system, new environment, new community. Everything you did for Maemo was awesome.. but.. what have you done for MeeGo lately ;).

Also.. that Thanks! button must never leave. I care more about that Thanks button than Karma.. Thanks is fun :).

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

@GeneralAntilles i read first post of that thread and it talks about earning rank via post count, i suggest forum Karma for rank to make people earn it instead of spamming for it.
As for deciding titles i can see how that could become a issue for a few not liking names etc.
but if we nominate a few to decide Titles and amount of Karma to reach them then it might solve that.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Actually.. a lot of this has to do with supply and demand as well. How many people are capable of doing the Banker's work, and how many people are capable of doing the dogcatchers.

This really determines the pay value of a particular skill set or job.. your competition.

This is also one of the reasons why very important jobs make little money.. Take Police Officers. Those are very crucial to the security and safety of a country... but there are *tons* of people that want to be cops. If you're not willing to do it for X pay because you think you deserve higher, than someone else will. Military, OTOH, are equally important - but they get quite a few more benefits, and likely faster promotions - not as many people want to sign away 4-5 years of their life to the government so they get bribed too.

The problem that exists trying to equate Karma to real life is exactly the kind of thing you said you believed was now flawed. How many people are capable of developing a full-fledge very high end 3D game for the platform? Therefore, when they release their app: technically they should get higher Karma than someone like me that comes through and writes a wrapper for a CLI tool.

Unfortunately - how do you dynamically code karma based on the complexity of apps? We can't just do "Developers karma X, Bug reporters karma Y, Forum contributors Z" system because of the various aspects that are involved with each section. This really gets into building an entire economical system just for a simple score. Karma becomes a sudo-money.. except that instead of people paying it, it's an automatic payment based on a system of logic.

As you said.. this won't work. In real life, you don't really have a choice - you're likely worth more than your job pays you - but you take the job you can get.

In a community such as this - people will get butthurt if they're told their contributions aren't as important as someone else's and so they get a lower Karma score. Enough so that they may not come back. Karma becomes something negative.

Unfortunately.. the opposite end of the spectrum - totally normalizing Karma as you were saying Tex, would make Karma become meaningless. I spent 5 hours building app X while qgil spent 500 hours building app Y, but we both built 1 app and received 5 karma points each. That just won't work either.

(damnit.. sorry about the book...)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

GeneralAntilles' idea of counting the absolute values is interesting. You can't deny I have done xxx wiki edits or I have filed xxx comments in bugs. Still the values might be flawed because there are edits that take 5 seconds and edits that take 5 minutes, good and bad edits. But still, they are contributions I have done.

Now, another element to consider: karma value vs ranking position. What works best for incentives, having xxx karma while it was xyy last month, or being xxxth in the ranking while being xyyth last month?

This is relevant because when comparing different activities the rankings are more difficult to deny: you were the 5th blogger, the 17th top bug reporter, the 137th wiki editor....

There could be a simple way to combine those values and conclude your ranking. That common value would implicitly promote that contributors get involved in more than one task in order to get higher "community rank", since "only Talk", "only git", "only blog" ight get you to the top of one rank, but far off the "Top of the Pops". Decent performers in several areas would be better candidates to get on the general charts, which probably makes sense since they will have a nive overview on several areas of the project and not just a couple of corners.

Perhaps this would work:

- The General rank would be useful to e.g. define who can be eligible in Council elections, Hall of Fame, etc.

- Specific ranks would be useful for specific purposes. Developer devices for top app developers, fresh protos for top platform developers, pre-sales devices for review to top bloggers, documentation hackfest somewhere inviting top wiki editors....

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

We use this in my team, but this is in addition to the normal karma-earning methods. This is how it worked for us:
* you get 10 give-away-karma-points every month
* you are free to give this publicly or privately to anyone
* you do not accumulate your give-away (every month you have only 10) and it is not part of your own karma

We have also experimented w separate lists (e.g. competence development sessions held, new things developed), but somehow it ended up too complicated.

I'm all for the one karma number, multiple different methods to earn, so everyone can pick their way to "earn their place" in the community, be it learning about things, helping newcomers, taking community tasks or developing things.

BTW, up until now I did not have expectations for free devices or anything, when I finally reach my 10 karma points ;) Is it really that common?

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Ultimately that is what Karma aims to do... you make a blog post people find useful, you get karma. You develop a Maemo application people like, you get karma. You help people on Talk, they thank you and you get karma.

The whole point of karma is to make people visible through all kinds of contributions to the community, not just the technical ones.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I proposed that around the last developer device program: make it possible to donate karma to people deserving it.

Even though the latest Karma algorithms (that I'm going to implement today) see quite far, computer-based systems can never find out about all useful contributions and reward karma for them.

Let us say I meet some other N900 user in a pub and he solves a problem for me, the only way for that to show up in karma would be if I can go and manually give him some of mine.

I think this has potential to push the karma a lot further than where it is now.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Isn't that exactly what we have now?

• General karma
• Top wiki contributors
• Top bloggers
• Top app developers
• Most thanked people on TMO
• etc

I would say most of that seems quite reasonable. There is slight skewing of blog karma because you're getting a lot of it for posting announcements on maemo.org for new devices etc, but that could be easily fixed by removing the "official news releases" out of blog karma count.

Karma helps to figure out the most productive members of the community for various purposes, and to give an incentive for people to be more active. If it wasn't in place then the "top Maemo contributors" list used for stuff like sponsoring people to events would be based purely on gut feel. And that would reward people who are more vocal, not the ones more helpful.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Indeed, and IMHO it's very silly and counter-productive. We want people who contribute because they enjoy it / it scratches their itch / they feel it's worthwhile according to their own value systems etc, not because of a carrot they might get if they "score" > x.

Even that is debatable. Rank on its own (as opposed to objective stats) is little more than a vanity exercise. In practical terms, all I had to do to get triaging rights was ping Andre, and as far as I know karma was not involved in the decision at all.

There isn't one IMHO, because fundamentally there is no valid way to assign values to each activity that make sense relative to each other, and there is no valid way to differentiate between signal and noise.

For example, your profile has 50 karma points for bugzilla comments and over four times as much for favourites. As absolute figures these have some usefulness (eg you can see at a glance that qgil has commented more than lma and favourited less than vdvsx), but once you aggregate them together and treat them as a single figure the result makes no sense.

Things for which maemo.org karma has been used in the past:

• Council nomination eligibility: I don't think it has made any difference there.
• Council vote eligibility: This is more of a filter to prevent lots of last minute sockpuppet accounts, but the account age criteria are perfectly adequate for that. To be honest the main problem we have with elections is getting even the eligible people to vote.
• As one of the sub-criteria for Summit sponsorship: At the end of the day applicants and talks were evaluated on their individual merits.
• Nokia Developer Discount Program: in Meego context there is less need for such programs as we will be able to run Meego "natively" on commodity PC hardware we already own. At the same time, programs like this are likely to come from more companies, each with their own selection criteria (most likely individual projects/proposals).

So overall I don't think it has added any real value to the maemo.org community, and bringing it over to meego.com is just baggage.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

This was discussed and answered in this thread and other threads before (the last one not even a month ago IIRC). Is it really helpful to pretend not to have read any of that and start from square one again? It has a tiring effect and is a tactic I've only known from my business life so far.

The opposite is true. There was only one device program that was based on Karma. Until then (end 2009), karma wasn't an issue and wasn't discussed much. So it has not always had a strong relation to free/discounted/loan devices. It never earned you free or loan devices. It only once it history earned you a discounted device.

Sounds very reasonable. I like the idea. (Actually, I already liked it a month ago when we discussed exactly the same topic.) I like it and it's what we already have, as Bergie pointed out. Can we move this over to meego.com now, please?

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I can't count the number of times I've tried to hit a Thanks button in bugzilla, the mailing lists, etc... I wish there was a way to give karma or thumbs-up or something to helpful community members all over the site.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I'm following this thread, but honestly I didn't follow the last round of karma discussion. Being the reason that already then I was thinking that we just spend too much time discussing karma.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

If we want to build a great community for MeeGo (as I think we do), we should plan these things properly and thoroughly. Such a potentially huge community will need lots of infrastructure to support it and bind it together. Forums, Karma, Brainstorm and Social News can be important parts of that.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I think we should take a Milestone for having the definition for Community activities e.g. end of Feb. And implementation in 1 week :)

Then the MeeGo sources go online and the whole thing will get into motion.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

This sounds a bit like the 'reputation' system which was used over at Brighthand for a while. You had some 'rep to give' and so on. The system didn't turn out to be troubleless though so it was abandoned in the end.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Seeing another round of karma debate. Makes me think we can happily stiock to absolute values in MeeGol (bugs reported, forum posts, thanks received etc)

At least for me personally this is one of the lowest items in the priority list. If anybody is interested in pushing it higher please go for it.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Probably best to discuss once we know the general direction of how the MeeGo community is going to be built. I'm quite happy with the maemo one, so from my PoV following as many of the examples from here as possible makes sense.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Quim, your last statement makes me want to qualify one of my own: contributor recognition is what's important to me, not necessarily any particular system. ;)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

The browser team (mostly timeless, I think) had a short-lived bugzilla contributor recognition program at the end of 2007 involving t-shirts. I'd love to see a budget for some swag-bribery recognition programs for the various contribution areas. . . .

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

This is an issue that's almost impossible to discuss in isolation.

What it boils down to is: What is Karma used for?

My gut instinct is that your initial (perhaps provocative) position is correct - Karma is more hassle than it's worth, and starting from when it becomes used for anything important, there are endless debates about what activity is more important than others.

Application karma, on the other hand, is excessively useful for ranking applications - it is like the hit parade/box office charts for apps. It won't tell you that "Twelve Angry Men" is a great movie, but it will tell you that in recent weeks a bunch of people really liked Avatar.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Sure, application karma and News karma are very useful!

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Just put a Thanks! button on all the activities and sum it up in the end. The absolute stats and raw numbers can stay for those that care for those things.

Like many said you can't really quantify how much work a simple app is or a bug report or a wiki edit. In the end you really want to know did this activity made a lot of people happy or not? You can't do that with an algorithm so let the people decide to award it or not.

And the purpose of the karma is to award for the stuff that you did and that people liked. It doesn't really need to have a physical award, just the appreciation is enough for the right people to do good things. You said it yourself that bringing the device program corrupted the whole process.

If you like the idea, hit the Thanks! button :p

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Ultimately, this whole debate is discussed in Normative ethics.
Let me structure it for you:

1. Virtue ethics - here the intent is more important than the actual outcome. If you agree with this theory, then you only need the raw numbers. It doesn't matter that one wiki edit describing a "how-to free up the root partition" was more helpful than 10 small for grammar edits. The first one gets 1 point, the second 10.

2. Deontology - this is pretty much what we have now. Some arcane algorithms deciding the karma of us mere mortals.

3. Consequentialism - that's what I propose. Make a global karma/thanks donation system spanning all the relevant activities so that every user can decide what's the most important, helpful and useful to him. Crowd source karma.


Those guys have hit the nail imho. Give every user each month 100 karma points to give away and put karma buttons everywhere. :D

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I am going to have to go with GA in some respects on this.

Karma in this case is a token economy. A token economy only works if the tokens can be redeemed for something that is valued.
What is valued by one may not be valued by another.
The simple way to equalize this is to have a standard. A swag standard is a good idea. T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. should be offered in exchange for karma. Nothing more.

Because after all, participation in the community has it's own rewards and what they are is determined by each individual.

However, how would redemption affect totals? Once karma is redeemed is it removed so it can not be used again or should the amount be tagged as used but still carried in the total?

Manufacturers developer or promotional device programs should not be tied visibly to karma because that is when the silliness ensues.

The organization should never accept the role of determining who is eligible for a device. Period.

If promotional devices have a value to the manufacturer then dang it, they need to do their homework and determine who is eligible. Who will give them a return on their investment. If they want to use the karma system as a guide then that would be their decision and not the organizations. How they actually end up determining who the recipients are and when they will begin doling them out should not be public information either, unless it is their intent to influence the organization in some way.

If the manufacturer wishes to donate devices to this organization for distribution then this organization should introduce chance into the equation. Every member should have a chance regardless of ranking. This will provide the appearance that the organization is at least an arms length away from any individual outcome. It would also help support the value proposition of the organization; that of one member, one vote. Karma could be used for additional chances. However, every member has at least a chance.

Anything else would be seen as corrupting or corruptible, no matter how innocently it is determined by the organization.

That there^ is my two bits and nothing more. :)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

You raise valid points YoDude but excluded the Pure Ego aspect. For some the number itself is worth bragging rights and that is enough. But maybe the expected praise and adoration of the humble masses is the redemption. :D

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I thought that^ kind of covered it. However, we can post back and forth a few times in order to raise our karma. :)

If karma can be perceived to be redeemed for something as valuable as the device we are all here for in the first place, then sooner or later an ego, through self evaluation may determine that our posts are not as valuable as his or her edits, bug reports, etc...
Just as likely is the possibility that an ego may determine that the words we type in forum discussions like this somehow have a greater importance than they actually do . :eek:

Either way, if the net difference is a dang t-shirt, refrigerator magnet, or coffee mug there would be less tumult IMHO, and anyone can still brag over totals if that's what floats their boat. :)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

I meant the karma number... I didn't get the impression you were including that in your statement.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Thanks everywhere: nice idea but depending how requires a lot of work for implementation (e.g. Thanks button under Bugzilla comments). If you are talking about thanks button directly under user profile then it's simpler (stil: can thank a user more than once? etc).

Convertible karma: is it me the only one thinking that the last we need in our community is more mercantilism? If karma is useful to get the right to own a shirt then I don't want karma at all. Sounds like accumulating flight miles for some fidelity program!

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Indeed, my intention with the swag program was to allow leaders within those sectors to highlight particularly useful contributors.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Part of the thanks system is it to be visible and specific. So that the user can directly see which action (post/comment/edit) was useful and for how many people. A thank button in the profile makes sense if you're just feeling generous to that person, or if he helped you in a bar or something like that mentioned above.

I also think that the appreciation for ones work is a reward enough. It not only promotes the right behaviour but also the right people. :)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

My favourite idea so far is to just drop general karma, and give 1 point per everything, and allow people to see a ranking of the people with the most thanks, the most bugzilla reports & comments, the most wikipedia edits, git commits, whatever. Just absolute ranking per-activity, with (eventually) a position among the Maemo community (20th) for each item. That way people who think Talk is important will concentrate more on Talk ranks, and people who think owning projects is more important will concentrate on that ranking.

Dave.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

But those raw stats and rankings aren't meaningful.

You for example have 170 Posts but have been Thanked 351 times for them.
I have 393 Posts and have been Thanked 214 times for them.
Obviously you've been more helpful to the community than me. :)
If we only look at post count, it'll promote more spam than useful behaviour.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

That's about it. :)

The difference is where the member is coming from...
A user/community member vs. a user/developer. If it is the former then karma is just that... a frequent flyer program and is a function of sales.
If it is the later than karma is a tool that can be used to determine the relative value of contributions and is a function of R & D.
As I posted in yet another karma thread, perhaps it is time to seperate the two... karma and Meearma??? :eek:

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

A user/community member can have valuable contributions as well.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Exactly. Which is why the current karma works as it does, to enable finding out and crediting valuable contributors who do other things than write code.

To be successful a project needs a lot more than just hackers and bug reporters (though obviously without those two the project wouldn't exist in the first place)

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

Objviously, Thanks count is the more desirable measure ;)

Dave.

Re: Pushing the maemo.org karma concept to meego.com?
 

And I'm just arguing that the same will be more appropriate than raw bug comments, wiki edits, etc... ;)