A proposal just filed to the Maemo Brainstorm:

Developers should get karma based on the relevance of their software

Currently the developers receive karma basically based on how many Garage projects are maintaining or involved with. This is actually a not very relevant statistic: one developer might have only one project making happy to 100.000 users (see Mplayer) while other might have opened 14 garage projects for 14 command-line direct ports of Debian that actually nobody uses or could care less about.

This is not easy to address as there are many possibilities to be unfair e.g. several developers in a project with different degree of involvement, apps downloaded by thousands that are "easy" ports of projects developed hardly by someone else. I wouldn't make big fuzz of this karma for developers, but it would be good to take it into account somehow.

Currently it's easier to get plenty of karma blogging about apps, talking about apps and commenting bugs in apps... but at the end are the dvelopers who carry with a lot of the hard work. Let's praise them!

Please rate the solutions proposed in the Maemo Brainstorm, add your own solutions and comment (in the Brainstorm if possible).

Ooo, I love contextual rating solutions! Very nice, Quim!

Wouldn't Downloads and comments on apps be good metrics to start with?

EDIT: I'll take that question to the Brainstorm.

The trouble with download metrics is that you have no feedback how many people UN-installed the app Imagine you have an app that has 1.000 downloads and a 4.9 score, and one with 10.000 downloads and a 3.9 score... How would you compare the karma of the two ? Are the extra downloads results of quality and recommendations, or just flashy screenshots and catchy project descriptions ?

I'll write here, better no pollution in the Brainstorm page.

@Quim: I don't see an edit button anywhere and I only have Create solution and idea in the drop-down menu. How do I edit my solution?

@Texrat: They're counted, but very slow

I have solutions to that... but should we move the discussion to the Brainstorm, or would people prefer answering here as well?

Hmmm, so once I ahve enough karma I can vote and run for council, what other reason should I care about Karma?

Why do I care if my Karma is 350 or 3500, or 35000???

For editing, there should be a "notepad with pencil" icon next to your solution. I think.

If you absolutely cannot edit your solution, post what you want it to say here. I can update it. (I think.)

I will write a Karmasutra app to boost my dev karma :-)

In earnest: it will be extremely difficult to find a solution for that. The maemo dev community is still very small (just subtract all the somehow-Nokia-related devs in garage/downloads and see what remains!) which makes me think that it is currently too early to introduce more granularity / more complex rules into the karma formula.
In fact, each app available in downloads should just get huge karma just for trying and getting there! (and additional points should be given for apps ending up in the maemo extras repository).

Also, the state of many apps in garage is quite "open"...

In addition, how should we count the extremely high differences in application complexity? Examples: Canola vs. some (of my) Desktop Search Plugins vs. (future Maemo 5) WRT widgets.

I'd say: let it rest for another 6 months.

No notepad or pencil (or both)

I just want to remove the excessive "Solution #4" in the title.

I confirm Kamen's experience-- I never see that notepad either.