Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

Either location you pick loses valuable input from community members, neither is perfect. In my own personal opinion, however, picking Talk as the only point of community discussion loses the input from more people I respect than picking the mailing list.

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

You can't...
Eyeballs equals the community. Post value could be tied to eyeballs but that would end up with your high quality mailing list posts receiving less value than a post in a thousand post forum thread.
BTW, I will have to take your word on the quality of mailing list posts. I haven't followed a mailing list since the Denizens of Doom (DoD #73). :)

Perhaps a separation of application developer activities and community activities should be made. Karma for community + Bija for application development.
The value of a contribution can be determined by the particular group that affects it.

The relationship between Karma to Bija can be determined by Nokia for any benefits it wishes to offer at any time it wishes to offer them. In this way Nokia can have the mix that they want at the time time that they want it.

Each groups ego's will be served, heavy contributors to one groups activities and not the other will reap rewards, and those who are closer to Nirvana by having numbers in both categories will receive distinction among their peers in either group.

Just a thought. :)

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

Is a discussion which has lots of quality input and leads to a useful conclusion but involves only a few people and not a large number of lurkers more important than one which serves only to share information?

Seems to me like there are two different types of posts in question here, and neither is necessarily more or less useful than the other. One of them, perhaps, just provides more immediate advantages for the people reading it.

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

What is your argument?

And BTW, I think we all would like to have harnessed the enthusiasm that was generated in some of those thousand+ post threads. However, you can't focus it. You just need to provide opportunity.
Karma has done that somewhat but as I and others have said in another thread, we haven't been very good at providing other opportunities. I would love to comment in a thread when I see that someone has an interest in another area that might contribute to the general good of maemo.org. Something like:
"Sure, just click on the tab of the top of the page and you will be taken to Bugzilla, or the software comments page, or a WiKI."
I don't very often because that person may come back to that thread with off topic questions like "How come I need to register again?" or "It took me to a page where there are no images showing up, Is this right?" or (add your own here).
It would be very cool if they could come back to the thread before too many posts have accrued and report "done and done".

That can't happen now and it couldn't happen in 2007 when you first saw me post about it. Until it can happen, these are not opportunities but barriers that should be torn down. Until they are, it's inevitable that some from one group or the other will feel incorrectly that they were either denied or their opportunity to contribute in those other ways was somehow restricted by these barriers.

So my argument (if any :) ) would be. Go with the flow and have two sets of numbers, one for each group. A Yin and Yang if you will. The well rounded members like yourself will have high marks in each.
Yin's will take pride in their contribution to the community and Yang's will take pride in theirs. We will all know that contributions from both are needed and required for a strong community.
Hoo Ra!

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

Only that the number of times something is viewed isn't necessarily an effective metric for measuring "usefulness".

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

*LOL* This remark about hacking being too easy for qwerty made me laugh. You really have a point here. I propose to cut qwerty's karma by half right now for this very reason, no matter if and how the karma sytsem will be changed. :D

But seriously, I'm not sure about the "invested effort" vs. "usefulness" stuff. Coming from the "karma is a measure for community involvement" camp, I am in principle against the idea that only useful things earn you karma.

OTOH, I agree it would be cool to have some measure of "how useful are my efforts to the community". That's why I think that it makes sense to count posts as one thing, but thanked posts as another (with a higher ranking). And it makes sense to qualify blog posts and applications via their rating (or maybe download numbers).

Still, I would be very unhappy if in the end the karma value would only reflect quality instead of quantity. As long as the (estimated) quality criteria we can somehow get hold of are part of the calculation and can be viewed as such in the user's profile, it should make both camps happy.

Maybe - this is just a quick idea while typing - it would work if the "posts vs. thanked posts"-system is applied to other parts of the calculation.
My profile shows
This could work for blog posts (count all of them, but show "thumbs up" for the posts according to "thanks" on a new line), applications (numer of apps vs. rating for apps) and so on. As it shows two distinct parts of your activity: One thing is what you do (write a blog entry), the other thing how it's received in the community (number of thumbs up).

Once these things are separate, you can check how useful your contributions are - which is part of your karma, but not all of it.

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

^Doesn't it already do that? I have an entry for posts, and a different one for 'thanks' - both of which I assume are a factor of the total. The thanks karma is significantly higher than the posts karma.

Equally, I'm pretty sure that a blog post with no thumbs up will get less karma than a blog with a lot of thumbs up. It's hard to be exact as karma appears only to update occasioanlly ((whereas I post almost constantly :p )

So that's basically what we have now, and the aim would be to tinker with the equations (and fade point) to reflect what the community deems most valuable. For practical example, I think karma for t.m.o. posts should fade faster than karma for apps - since apps last longer.

Which brings us back around to what we deem most valuable, and why. And the element that it matters because there are real-terms valuables riding on it. Do we (or Nokia) want to target where those valuables go? (Discounts for devs and t-shirts for active posters?)

See, I already consider myself amply rewarded by what I get back from the community (and you should see the look on people's faces when I say Nokia sent me to Barcelona!) When I showed a colleague the sheep game she fell over at the idea that the community was building something I'd dreamt up. I get far more than I put in already. And in terms of 'real life karma', that means I should be in negative. ;)

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

However, the point that measuring a person's activity (for no other purpose than just measuring it) increases the productivity against that measure. (For those of you at Nokia World, remember Dan Pink's presentation; if not, look it up on TED/YouTube).

Karma in and of itself has value in motivating people to get more of it (in general). So, in terms of picking a balance to decide who we want to reward we should ensure that it also highlights the areas we want people to contribute in.

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

Hi,

I agree, it is a pain.

It's ironic, though, that you posted to the mailing list (where the discussion started) to ask everyone there to come here (where penguinbait moved the discussion) and to repeat their points here for the benefit of everyone who doesn't read the list.

You would likely lose a lot of input from me if maemo-community were done away with in favour of tmo. I simply don't have the time to spend tracking every discussion in even one forum here.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Sprint task: Refine the karma system (community input requested)
 

I'm not sure the "where do I participate in the dialog" dilemma is easily solved. Oh sure something could be coded to up to automagically cross-pollinate between forum posts and mailing lists but that wouldn't really be a solution, because the point made many times by many people remains valid: different environments suit different conversational needs (and different people). I happen to think tmo is best for this sort of discussion, mail lists for shorter types and IRC for shorter ones still-- but that's just me. I won't suggest to anyone that their preferences are "wrong". Sometimes it also boils down to a person's particular degree of engagement, too.

so... back to topic...?