On 12/05/2013 01:36 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Adam Spiers
wrote: Bruno Friedmann (bruno@ioda-net.ch) wrote:
I hate karma :-)
When I saw so stupid answers by HighSuperGod Karma on forums, which I avoid like the pest due to karma system.
The meaningfulness of karma depends entirely on how it's allocated. I'm sure it's easy on some forums for idiots to obtain high karma, but I challenge you to find any really stupid answers on stackoverflow written by people whilst they had > 10,000 reputation points :-) Please be wary of inaccurate extrapolation or over-generalization.
I believe it should be possible to find a karma system which works for openSUSE. I don't believe it will be easy though ;-)
I think this is a very important point that probably was not clear enough in the initial proposal: we realize that this is a terribly complicated idea with great potential to do harm.
And yes, a 'karma-driven development process' sounds scary and wrong. I think that that idea takes a far too narrow, technical view of the development process of a Linux distribution, which is about people and human relationships. Bruno's response makes this very clear.
But that doesn't mean there is no good in it. There is more to the karmafication idea than a single score.
Karmafication is about making contributions visible: credit where it is due.
For example, having a single page (on connect, most likely) where a visitor can see in what areas a contributor is active, for how long and how - that would be a step forward. Like seeing how many and what packages somebody maintains, what events he/she visits (note that this is connected to a rather old proposal: https://features.opensuse.org/312181 ), what languages he/she translates, who is mentoring who, stuff like that.
Think like how "number of accepted SR's person X has in Factory" is a valuable thing for deciding to make somebody maintainer or accepting a package in a Devel project. How "number of events organized" helps the TSP decide to choose who to support for an upcoming event. Right now, both decisions are made on pure personal relationships. That is unfair for people living in South America or India, for example. Language, culture and distance DO play a role there. No, we can't REPLACE personal relationships, but we can help people who have to make decisions (like the TSP or the teams maintaining Devel projects or Factory) with relevant information.
And with regards to motivation: out of this data, we can easily show a top-ten of contributors to Factory, to the wiki, to the forums - things like that. That is motivating, more for some than for others, but saying it does nothing is just not true.
Again, it is about credit where it is due: some people in our community do a HUGE amount of hard work, without themselves even knowing HOW MUCH their work is appreciated by others. Our home repo's on OBS don't show how many users they have. Some have tens of thousands of people downloading packages - do you all not agree that that would be great to make visible?
Think about Karmification this way: it is about showing who does what
No problem with showing who does what and how much of it.
and what the value of that is.
Here is the problem. I am going to offend some people now, but, well, get over it. Who is going to play God and decide what the value of a contribution is? This is not the community that we are! We do not need a group of select/elite people to decree what the value of contributions are! Additionally values cannot be measured in this sense in the first place. For example when a wiki page is translated to a language I do not speak the value of that contribution to me is zero. But for someone who does not speak/read the language in which the wiki page was originally composed and the wiki page "suddenly" shows up in their native language the value of the translation contribution is extremely high. Stick to the idea of showing what people do and forget about the idea of having to put a "value" on everything. Apparently some things do get forgotten, so let me do the honor """" We are... ... a community that provides free and easy access to Free and Open Source Software. We innovate, integrate, polish, document, distribute, maintain and support one of the world's best Linux distributions. We are working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source community. """"" There is nothing in here that says we put values on contributions by rating them.
That should be fair, clear and transparent.
As soon as you assign a value it will no longer be fair or clear. 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