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.

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

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.

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 .

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 .

@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.

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...)

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....

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?

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.

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.