May I add the following:

As far as I remember, Karma was introduced to measure how deeply somebody is involved. Writing 100 posts a month sure is involvement.

The reason why one can gather Karma for pretty much everything that can be counted here is that Karma doesn't judge. It doesn't (in theory) know about "useful" and "useless" activity. It only knows "activity". Because "activity" is what it should measure. It's a very generic thing. It doesn't measure somebody's skills as a developer. It doesn't tell anything about the quality of your contributions. High Karma values only say: This person comes to sites that somehow belong to the maemo.org empire and do something there. Whatever that may be.

The reason why this isn't really problematic is that Karma only counts when we try to draw a line at elections: We want people to vote who probably know something about this community and invest some of their time. Karma is a good way to tell just that. For this purpose, again, it doesn't matter at all what these people do at maemo.org. They are here, they maybe vote for applications or participate in mailing lists, whatever... No reason to know if their votes are reasonable or their posts on the mailing lists are useful.

This is what Karma is.

Trying to introduce an iron curtain between the "good doers" and the "bad talkers" doesn't do any good. First time I read about this doers/talkers thing I felt personally insulted. (Actually, I still am.) I mean, come on, the great doers write lousy apps that drain people's batteries and us dirty talkers then need to support noobs at t.m.o. who fell into that trap... No, I don't really mean what I wrote in bold before, it's just a provocation... and a vision of what could happen. Do we want to start this kind of "us vs. them" discussion in our community? Really? Doers vs. talkers? Is that what we want? For a number on your maemo.org profile, FCS?!?!

Let's be honest, the thing that started the Karma discussion was the community device program for the N900. Developers thought they should have received a device and couldn't understand why bloggers got one. Got "theirs".

If this is the reason why we're discussing this, stop discussing Karma and start discussing criteria for the next device program. You can count anything. You can count the number of apps in Extras somebody uploaded if you want to cancel the community device program and make it a developer only program. Go ahead, that's a reasonable thing to discuss. (I would advise against it, but at least I see a point here and can understand why this is an issue.)

Tuning Karma as such: maybe, if there's obvious problems. (Such as: How does Karma collected 3 years ago reflect current community involvement?)

Tuning Karma to make it prefer "good" activities over "bad" activities: no. Especially when the good/bad line runs between the doers and the talkers. We found out during the device program discussion that there actually are developers who have little karma because they just don't come here. They develop and release, but aren't, you know, "part of the community". I wouldn't want to change Karma calculations so that people can get high Karma without really being here.