Hello, Am Donnerstag, 5. Dezember 2013 schrieb Ancor Gonzalez Sosa:
1. Decision making. As you all know, most final decisions on the technical side rests in Coolo's shoulders. He plays the role of a benevolent dictator, working based on his perception of skills and dedication. Sure he is fair and experienced but still a single human being.
And a karma system would change that in which way? ("everybody with >1000 karma points is allowed to submit directly to factory without review" is not the answer, at least I hope so ;-)
2. Guidance We lack a clear path from newbie to contributor and then to experienced contributor (like maintainer, reviewer etc). Also, we
Maybe because such a path doesn't exist, at least not as _the_ path?
have a wide variety of guidelines which we'd like people to follow better but which aren't hard rules.
And you really think rewarding them with a number of points displayed somewhere will help? People will (hopefully) follow rules that make sense, but I'm quite sure nobody will follow the "jump into the sea _now_" rule just because you offer a karma point for doing that ;-)
3. Motivation There are areas in openSUSE that do not get the love and attention they deserve in both technical and non-technical terms. People who work on them should be recognized and rewarded.
While I agree with the goal - do you really think displaying a numer somewhere is a reward or a motivation? As you probably already guessed, I don't care about karma points. It's just a type of paperwork, and if you want that, you can have more fun with an "Antrag auf Erteilung eines Antragsformulars" ("motion for granting a motion form" - and that's just half of the title) If you understand german, I can recommend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60cmsLJ--G8 ;-)
How does Karmafication support the factory proposal goals in the above areas?
I'd guess "nowhere" ;-)
Karma should have an impact in:
1. Decision making. Make contributions visible: credit where it is due. Having a profile page for every contributor in OBS would be useful in decision making at all levels. Is this person a good candidate to become technical reviewer? Should I accept this risky SR to factory?
Ah, now things become more interesting. You just found out that karma points earned by wiki edits say nothing about packaging skills. In other words: something like "openSUSE karma" (as a total of all areas) is useless. OTOH, having "OBS karma" at least isn't totally useless (I'm still not sure if I should call it useful ;-) - but even that is too much summarized. Maybe someone earns lots of points with packaging perl modules, but then one day submits a C patch that is totally broken because he rarely writes C. Based on your proposal, you would happily accept it because of the good karma. Besides that - I'm quite sure that you can answer your questions easily based on a contributor's name and don't need any statistics. Oh, and there's still... general rule: if Olaf reports a bug, it is a valid bug. [Olaf Hering while reopening https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=168595] ;-)
In the future, once the system is mature enough, a minimum of karma could even be required to perform some actions.
Please forget about this - I understand what your intention is, but it won't work. Just as an example - maybe someone wants to package "his" software for openSUSE and get it into the distribution, but personally uses $other_distribution. How should this person earn karma points to be "allowed" to submit the package to factory? The result will be that he won't create the package at all.
2. Guidance By defining tasks and rewards we could 'spell out' a path, or several, from beginner to more experienced contributor. Think for example a number of tasks around your first step to contributing; or tasks related to more advanced hackery like fixing certain type of bugs. It could also be used as a way of define best practices for OBS and encourage people to follow them.
I like the idea of having a "how can I help?" list with different levels of difficulty (split by topics like wiki, packaging, ...) However I wouldn't connect it to karma. ("I'm new here - does that mean I shouldn't do the more difficult stuff?")
3. Motivation Motivate people and visibly reward them for working on things which usually fly below the radar. It would be great to have openSUSE contributors pointing to their OBS profile pages as a reference of their skills and experience, in the same way that most open source developers points to their github page. We could make this recognition more tangible with some special gifts (what about a "I take care of stuff!" t-shirt?).
I always like a nice t-shirt ;-) - but again, I'm sure we don't need to count points to know who does the work. And, as Pascal already pointed out, the better text would maybe be "I tricked the karma system" ;-)
A big benefit of Karmafication over other ways of reaching the same goals is that most alternatives require making rules, commitees and bureaucracy and require much more work.
Counter-question: how much time will it take to develop the karma system? (Note: It will _not_ be easy to implement for all areas of openSUSE, and it will at least need rules to define how many points a specific type of contribution earns.) How often could a commitee meet in that time to choose and announce some "openSUSE heros"? How much other work with "real" user benefit, for example fixing bugs [1] could we do in this time?
Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution with a karma-driven development process?
I'm quite sure you can guess my answer ;-) Regards, Christian Boltz [1] we have lots of "old" open bugs, and last time I checked, the number of those old bugs was about the amount of bugreports we get for each release. So either we have to ship a totally bug-free release to have time to fix the old bugs, or we need to invest some more time in fixing bugs ;-) PS: Yes, I know the (random) sig is too long, but it's too good to shorten it. And it's still much shorter than this mail ;-) -- Cars are a huge downgrade from horses in many ways. They don't reproduce themselves, they can't drive themselves safely with you asleep or drunk, or missing altogether. They can't climb mountain trails and jump fenses. They don't come to you automatically when you whistle. You get speeding tickets in them but never on a horse. You don't have to dig horse fuel out of the ground on the other side of the planet and protect it with wars and then boil it in huge stills and then be super careful not to let it catch fire or explode the whole time it's being stored and used. You can't get a speeding ticket on a horse. Horses don't need paved roads and toxic substances in general. [Brian K. White in opensuse-factory] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org