Thanks for posting that - unsurprisingly it has come categories mine doesn't

It raises for me the question of how we capture 'developer helpfulness' for want of a better term.

Case one: dev creates a low level but rather fun widget and posts it to the system. It's fun, demands very little of the user and never needs updating.

Case two: dev creates a complicated but extremely useful app: some users in the tsting stage (and even after) find it confusing. Dev routinely invites them to hop on IRC for a talk through.

Case three: dev has an idea which s/he is working on. User suggests an additiona feature - dev picks the idea up and runs with it.

IMHO cases two and three should get higher karma. But there's no way for the user to vote not onluy for the app but for whether the dev was helpful/interactive etc. Could there be?

Maybe we need to think about the post and thanks metrics. Maybe we can develop an algorithm that takes the two into account together for better qualification. A ratio of some sort.

I used to do quite a bit of that algorithm development... I'm a little rusty, but I'll try to work on it this week.

EDIT: I'm also working on something I call a "user experience framework" for lack of a better term. There's a Brainstorm for it as well. In a nut shell, an important aspect is to improve metrics gathering related to user acceptance of apps along with the various related activities. I'll have something rough on my blog shortly.

Perhaps "karma" for application development and testing and activity across maemo.org should be split into two different things (and not weight differently and summed together) but two different scores.

Arg... I'd rather they be weighted to bring them to some sort of parity...

The issue with weighting is that some group is always going to feel slighted or undervalued. I can't understand why (it's just a number). But benny1967's explains the issues I could think of with having them combined.

But by having seperate counts, at least for distributing prototype devices Nokia could split them between developers [for building applications ahead of time] and the community [bug finding, reviews, critiques, handling the masses, etc..] if there were two different "karma" systems.

Having separate value systems doesn't make the problem of weighting go away... it just moves it. But maybe that concern is moot. It all comes down to how Maemo wants to utilize karma values. If they want X number of Talkers and Y number of Coders, etc, at the next Summit, then separate systems may actually be preferable. On the other hand, if they want to indiscriminantly pull from the community at large, then we need an ultimately homogenic system.

Which means before we look at how to configure karma, we need to ask exactly who we want karma to highlight.

Which brings us back to the contraversial question of 'value' again.

Karma is an odd word. Aside from its use on internet forums (where it is synonymous with 'kudos' usually) its root is a religious term focused in the concept of reaping reward. 'Karma' is the principle that you will 'be done by as you did', that 'what goes around comes around', that you will get your just desserts (for good or ill).

Somewhere in this discussion we need a conversation about what karma 'means'. The idea of 'reward' - whether in discount, attendance at events etc - is a part of karma. We cannot divorce that from the question of who we give karma to. If it's just another 'popularity contest' as it is in almost every other internet forum, then it doesn't matter a right lot how it works.

Beautifully said, Kathy, and proof once again of why your ranking has risen so far, so fast.

Speaking for the average not-very-useful user, karma seems to be too big an issue
Benny was right. Some things in life cannot be correctly quantified. The usefulness of people is one of those things (some world leaders tried to do that; they are generally considered evil)
To be honest, i'm not sure how the council system works, so forgive me if i'm talking out of my backside. But from what i understand, all people with karma above a certain level (to leave out new-comers or mere plebeians) get to vote. The N people with the most votes get elected. Seems to work fine. Why should the device program use an automated system and bypass user choice? As a human, i can understand qole's work on easy debian is much more useful and hard than the mirror app (no offense to that guy, it's just not... useful). I can also value kathy's non-technical contribution, and give her posts more credit than, say, orangebox 's.
All in all, i say the issue is not about how to quantify karma, but rather what to do with it. If nokia isn't willing to call for votes when they want to give away devices (which might disclose their intentions and blah blah blah), hold double polls when choosing the council: one for the council, and one to make a list of the most useful 300-500-1M people, in order, to be chosen for fun stuff. That way it's objective, as fair as it gets (for all my distrust of humans, i still think they can choose better than computers) and easy to implement. And karma can have whatever algorithm you want, it will be just as relevant as the user's ability to do the electric boogaloo

Seeing as how itT went a long time without Thanks!, this metric is biased against older members.