On 12/05/2013 05:17 PM, Adam Spiers wrote:
Robert Schweikert (rjschwei@suse.com) wrote:
Who is going to play God and decide what the value of a contribution is?
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As soon as you assign a value it will no longer be fair or clear.
Why? You may be right, but there seems to be a big jump in the logic of that statement. (Apologies if I missed something; I came to this thread late.)
Well, there is a good chance that I am missing something, but... Assigning "value" to a contribution implies that there is a "value system" i.e. contribution of type A gets 2 points, contributions of type B gets 3 points and so on. Such a value system is by definition arbitrary and creates all the problems that have already been pointed out. Thus, the "value" assignment appears flawed to me. The other option of a karma system that I can think of is that contributors give each other arbitrary points for what ever. Kind of like the "Whose line is it anyway" for those familiar with that TV show. The motto there is "Where the points don't matter and everything is made up". To see how that would work lets use oSC14 as an example and I'll misuse Andy as my example person. Nothing personal Andy, you do great work. Lets say Andy knocks the graphic design for oSC14 out of the park, and he will; so we all decide we love it and give him a million karma points for graphic design. Most likely Andy didn't do it all be himself. After all, its a lot of work and other people also want to participate and I know Andy is happy to accept help and work in a team. Thus, in order for the rest of us to hand out the karma points in a reasonable way we'd have to know all the helpers and know what each helper did. This clearly is much more detail than most community members will know or want to know. Therefore, it is hard for those handing out karma points to split their "award" amongst all of those that contributed. Now of course the argument will be made that Andy knows who helped and he will subtract some of his karma points and distribute them amongst the helpers. Andy is a really nice guy and certainly would be happy to split his point. However, this puts Andy in a really bad position as he now has to play "boss" and hand out karma points amongst those that helped. I would not want to be in that position and I am certain that Andy doesn't want to be in that position either. And while in this example it will only be a small team that is effected the fact that someone has to dole out the points leads us right back to the original problem we tried to solve by not having a value system and having people dole out points based on their liking of work of others. Bottom line is that for us, I think, it would be horribly complicated to try and avoid all the pitfalls. While I do subscribe the the theory that one cannot make everybody happy I think in this case it will most like make everybody unhappy. As someone else pointed out, it might be better for people to spend their time to address issues that truly plague us. We've managed just fine without a karma system so far. But, whom am I to tell people what to do and what not to do. If someone really thinks that we do not have more pressing things to resolve and a karma system has to be implemented, more power to them. Whether the community in the end accepts the results of such an effort or not is a completely different story. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org