I think the slight unbalance in the karma "formulas" do not make a big difference. There is usually visible diff in the first 2-4 weeks and probably after 1+ year, but the first period passes quickly and the on the long run it does not matter.
With this being said, Yes to karma and some points to consider:
* Community contribution (thanks/bugz/brains), development is good to be rewarded as before
* Learning should be rewarded too, so new users can gain karma (this promotes the right behaviour)
* If there would be an action handling system in the background, that could make it easier to track/give karma on community actions
Hopefully I can make all of this into a compelling proposal on the weekend
Are you considering the fact that plenty of professionals will be paid to work full time developing MeeGo openly and this will give an advantage over those purely volunteering?
Until now this situation was an exception. Myself for instance, toping the ranking since always (something that didn't make me proud, actually). Imagine if we would start counting commits at http://maemo.gitorious.org and imagine that most platform nokians are there mmiting every day. Imagine that they really move their bugzilla actuvuty outside.
How will you address the fact that developers from companies have high chances of being the ones on top? Combine this with the fact that such individuals can move roles inside a company or van change companies overnight.
I personally like an idea I heard a while back. Everyone earns some amounts of Karma regularly, but they can only give them to others. The karma they earn cannot count towards them. This means that if you have high karma, its because the community thinks you deserve it. If a paid worker is helping the community and earning large amounts of karma, they will have well earned it.
Karma should be earned by helping others, be it answering a question or making an app, writing a blog, writing helpful wikis. People can decide how to pass out their earned karma. It actually encourages coopetition and helpfulness.
More: I understand Valerio's point that karmas are useful in communities. This is why I proposed a karma system for maemo.org in 2007 and this is why I'm still noting that most of the tools we are using in maemo.org and will use in meego.com have traditions of karma generation.
But then, in maemo.org karma has got always some (strong?) relation with the expectation of getting a free / discounted / loan device. This is something that generate uncomfortable, distorted or even childish situations. You have seen it and I have seen it to the extreme.
In MeeGo, with more device vendors and a higher potential to have a bigger community, this combination can get really uncomfortable, distorting and perhaps even more childish.
This goes again back to the karma per tool but without mixing tools and karma values. If I love bug reporting I see the incentive and usefulness of having a senior rank in Bugzilla. If I'm into open source development I see the point of Ohloh statistics putting me near the top of the crop. If I'm into forum discussions then I see the incentive of being distinguished as a senior commenter.
But... what is the point of mixing all these stats, in a single and quite arbitrary value? Please answer.
What is the message? That I am more contributor than you because I'm lucky that blogging is overrated compared to app downloads or git commits? Please answer.
What is the final purpose? Is it the distribution of devices as an incentive or is it something more. Please answer.
