• Intro
• Downloads
• Community
• Development
• News
• TALK

Karma

Revision as of 12:49, 6 February 2009

Karma is a measure of the activity of Maemo community members. Several factors are taken into account when counting a user's karma measurement, including:

• Having a maemo.org account
• Posting to core Maemo mailing lists
• Commenting or rating Maemo news items, blog posts or products
• Joining Garage groups related to products
• Maintaining products on the Garage
• Writing blog posts
• Opening new bugs
• Commenting on bugs
• creating/editing wiki pages
• Posts on internettablettalk.com forum
• Thanks on internettablettalk.com forum

Each of these is weighted according to the activity to give the final karma total for a user. The maemo.org deployment of Midgard uses a different set of weights.

Weights

The karma calculation for each of these is calculated as follows:

• maemo.org account: 3 points
• Blog post: Blog posts are scored 1 + (number of favourites for post)
• Products: A product is defined as a release of a project for a specific Maemo release. Thus, if you maintain versions of your software for Bora and Diablo, you will double your karma for the project. A product is scored 1 + its average star rating ("price"), multiplied by the product modifier (7 on maemo.org). Thus, "MaemoPad+" has an average star rating of around 4.5, giving a karma weighting of 31.5 to its author, User:Disq, for each version he maintains.
• Discussion: 2 point per post to a core mailing list - maemo-developer, maemo-user or maemo-community
• Comments and favourites: Two points per comment, 0.25 per favourite and 0.25 per bury
• Groups: 3 points per group
• Wiki page edits: sqrt(edits) * 2
• itT posts: sqrt(posts)
• itT thanks: sqrt(thanks) *8
• bugzilla new bug reports: bugs * 4
• bugzilla comments: sqrt(comments)

Proposed improvements

The following things should be measured, and be worth about the same karma:

• Being a maintainer of a popular project
• Being a member of 2 to 3 groups
• Writing about 5 popular blog entries
• Closing about 10 bugs
• Opening about 10 bugs
• Writing about 25 emails to mailing lists
• Making about 50 wiki edits
• Making about 50 comments in Bugzilla
• Making about 50 comments on maemo.org
• Favouriting/burying about 100 things
• Perhaps saying about 200 things on IRC

The Karma measure would be improved by the following simple changes to existing measures:

• Blog posts: Score individual posts as follows:

score = 1 + (number of favourites for post) - (number of buries for post)
if (score < 1) then score = 1;
if (score > 10) then score = 10;

• Groups: Increase the groups modifier to 4
• Discussion: Modify discussion points to be scored as 2 * sqrt(# posts)
• Comments and favourites: Modify favourites and buries to sqrt (# favourites), and comments to 2 * sqrt(# comments)

New modules will be needed for three or four new karma measurements:

• Bugzilla: It makes sense to split out three activities: how many bugs someone has created done, how many comments they have made done, and how many bugs they have resolved.
• IRC: Perhaps use a bot to record daily comments? We need to measure how many IRC comments someone has made.

One other major improvement to karma would be to calculate only the *new* karma which someone has received since the last run, and add it to the running total. This would allow us to devalue old karma over time, making recent contributions worth more than old contributions, while keeping important contributions around from old-timers who have moved on. Devaluation might be something like 2% per month - the easy way to do this it to multiply current karma totals for everyone by 0.98 at the end of each month, and keep adding new karma points as before.

Unfortunately, we don't right now have an easy way to calculate this delta.