On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 01:40:38PM +0100, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

Hi all,

During the last days, the openSUSE Team has proposed several changes in the openSUSE processes and tools: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-11/msg00920.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00044.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00132.html

The main goal of this mail is to present another idea that was already discussed during the recent openSUSE Summit [...]

Yet another idea? Could you guys please sort out the three other proposals first? Drowning this mailing in proposals will just drive people away. Thanks, Michael. -- Michael Schroeder mls@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF Jeff Hawn, HRB 16746 AG Nuernberg main(_){while(_=~getchar())putchar(~_-1/(~(_|32)/13*2-11)*13);} -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/05/2013 07:40 AM, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

Hi all,

During the last days, the openSUSE Team has proposed several changes in the openSUSE processes and tools: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-11/msg00920.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00044.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00132.html

The main goal of this mail is to present another idea that was already discussed during the recent openSUSE Summit: the Karmafication of the openSUSE infrastructure. People there liked the idea and some related topics have already been raised in the last days on both Factory and Project mailing lists, so we bring the idea here for wider debate and especially to get input from you all.

The "Karma" idea has been around for at least 3 years most likely longer. So far we had no one interested in doing the work that needs to be done. A good start is Athanasios' work presented at oSC13 "How active are openSUSE members , developers and contributors?" (https://conference.opensuse.org/osem/conference/osc2013/proposal/45) In order to hand out Karma points contributions have to measured ;)

<snip>

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.

Well, you still need rules/guidelines unless you make it really simple, every contribution is 1 Karma point. But then that contribute a whol package get 1 Karma point ns the person the fixes a spelling mistake also gets 1 Karma point. Not that fixing spelling mistakes in the wiki isn't important, it just takes a lot less effort. This implies that the amount of Karma points handed out for contributions will need to be graded ins some way, maybe on a scale from 0 to 100 and someone will have to assign values for areas/categories. Assigning Karma points for "day in and out" work is probably somewhat tricky, but doing the same for bugs will be even more tricky. For bugs a Karma system implies that a review has to take place that assigns Karma points for fixing this particular bug.

Soft motivation through Karmafication brings us these benefits in a much nicer and more flexible way, hopefully without the downsides of rigorous rules. See this video for some insights in rules vs 'soft nudging': http://vimeo.com/54434167

What do you think about the whole idea?

Go for it.

Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution with a karma-driven development process?

NO. I think a Karma system would be nice to have but I would not be in favor of the "Karma system" driving the development process. 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

On Thursday 05 December 2013 13.40:38 Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

Hi all,

I hate karma :-) When I saw so stupid answers by HighSuperGod Karma on forums, which I avoid like the pest due to karma system. So go for karma, say good bye to me. If you're not able to recognize me, and do some retro-social-engineering like I do to discover a bit more about the real person I will have to talk, then we're not a community of people, but blink-blink fan's club of K Please preserve us from that. On a doing point where can I submit my sr delete proposal ;-) $ -- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/05/2013 08:23 AM, Michael Schroeder wrote:

On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 01:40:38PM +0100, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

...

Hi all,

During the last days, the openSUSE Team has proposed several changes in the openSUSE processes and tools: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-11/msg00920.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00044.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00132.html

The main goal of this mail is to present another idea that was already discussed during the recent openSUSE Summit [...]

Yet another idea? Could you guys please sort out the three other proposals first? Drowning this mailing in proposals will just drive people away.

The idea of moderation has gotten lost somewhere. We went from one extreme, "almost nothing" to the next "complete brain dump". If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd say there is stuff being hidden behind the flood ;) . BTW, I do not consider myself a conspiracy theorist. 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

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote: [...]

The main goal of this mail is to present another idea that was already discussed during the recent openSUSE Summit: the Karmafication of the openSUSE infrastructure. People there liked the idea and some related topics have already been raised in the last days on both Factory and Project mailing lists, so we bring the idea here for wider debate and especially to get input from you all.

Where can Karmafication be useful? [...]

Hi Ancor. It is a pity that it doesn't built on the thoughts that have already been made on that (or a similar) approach, but that's okay, let's think and talk. Where will Karmafication fail: * as mentioned a few times already, e.g. by Robert, unless you have a really, really fair, smart and somewhat automated way of assigning karma points to actions, there is really no point in going any further with this, because that is going to be the crux of it; contributions to the project come in many different forms, and I personally do not believe there is a fair way to account for such points, so what it is going to create is: - division through a feeling of unjust treatment (why do packagers get 10 points while translators only get 1 ? oh! so openSUSE is JUST SO DEVELOPER CENTRIC, we don't feel welcome here!!! -- think that won't happen? check the archives) - people who are going to game the system because they're only in for (apparent) reputation (we have had and still have a few of those, and while I won't name any names, some of us know exactly who I'm talking about) * one of the key aspects of this project is really the fact that anyone can contribute anything; of course there is quality control, of course people should be taken by the hand to improve their contributions, in a humanly positive manner, in a way that will keep their motivation intact (that's mentoring, and Karmafication doesn't address that -- and yes, we're not very good at mentoring, we know that); bringing a score based system is going to turn that around completely, because soon you'll be introducing - barriers (people need a certain score to be allowed to do this and that -- horrible, that would make us end up like Fedora in that regard, and NO, we don't want that) - people gaming the system, and you'll need to introduce safeguards against that... - apparent levels of "semi-gods" which will create fanboys, wrong impressions (oh, but the person who said that has karma level 99999 in openSUSE, so it must be representative of the whole project! -- think it won't happen? happens already, since a long time), and it will also create fear (who am I to talk to that person, I'm not worthy) and intimidation -- not willingly, mind you, but it will -- actually it exists already, but that will make it even worse * bureaucracy: you do mention that it would be a simple system without bureaucracy, but it will not be simple because you'll need to address the points above (and a lot more that will creep up and neither you nor anyone else has thought of at this point) We already have some experience with similar approaches, such as the Membership status, which was *never* intended as an "elite label", but it has quickly been seen and misinterpreted as such by a significant part of the community. There, too, we have always had issues "scoring" contributions to decide whether it amounts to enough to get membership status or not. Karmafication would be even worse, because it would be an actual number. Based on what?

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.

How is karma points going to help with that? Sorry, I really don't see the relation there. People with high karma would feel entitled to "be coolo-alike", have "coolo level" in the project? That's sick.

2. Guidance We lack a clear path from newbie to contributor and then to experienced contributor (like maintainer, reviewer etc). Also, we have a wide variety of guidelines which we'd like people to follow better but which aren't hard rules.

Yes, indeed, that's mentoring. And, also, I don't see how karma points will help with that. It still won't help with the fact that we don't have enough busy contributors who take time to do mentorship, that we don't have an active advocacy of the ways to be mentored in the project, nor "marketing" around it (because we don't have an established, clear, active mentorship program to begin with).

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.

So that's the idea of open source projects? Rewards? Reputation? Elite? Guys..... really.... ?

How does Karmafication support the factory proposal goals in the above areas? [...]

I'll better refrain from commenting on those. Sorry, but it's really naive and doesn't show much experience with how this stuff actually turns out to work in practice... I do realize how abrasive my comments are but c'mon guys, we can do better than this (maybe by brainstorming with a larger group of people). [...]

What do you think about the whole idea?

Worst idea I've heard in a long time, honestly.

Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution with a karma-driven development process?

Absolutely not. It pretty much goes against everything this project and community stands for. cheers, Pascal. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 05/12/2013 17:23, agustin benito bethencourt a écrit :

We bring this kamafication knowing it has been discussed before. Michal for instance have been involved in the GSoC around this in Connect.

I was, time ago, advocating the fact than all should turn around connect. Not having much heard about this I even forgot the name :-( if configured like facebook, connect could be (partially) a solution to make our community live. developpers may not need it (they have obs to stat they activity), but ambassadors, non developpers members can be very easily lost in notime. Asking then to "connect" once a month (example), rewarding this by some special things (publish on, connect the torrents of the new distro 2 days before the other...). make some announcements only there...

In any case, we have one or two more topics to go before proposing the "how". we can look for an alternative way of publishing if you think so. Our team blog is an option. I wonder how we could get feedback though.

go to connect, it's the moment if there is one! jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Agustin, On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 9:53 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Hi,

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For me, openSUSE Team should not be the "DOER" but should be the "ENABLER"

What I feel now is this, 1. I believe the intentions from the openSUSE team are well thought. 2. Since they are well thought and already thought, we should just put them forward. 3. openSUSE Team will take community feedback but will not respond to it.

Give us some more time. We are willing to prove you wrong.

Sure :)

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4. Instead, we will think about it and do it ourselves, this excludes

\>> a lot of community proposals.

We bring this kamafication knowing it has been discussed before. Michal for instance have been involved in the GSoC around this in Connect. The intention is not to make it look new, but to include it in the new context, since we really would like to put our hands on it these following months.

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Problem with this now is, it perfectly fits our "Just Do it" policy but are you really creating space for someone who can replace you when you feel like?

Do you guys really want to take the "My way or highway route"?

What I had really prefer was chipping in the proposal that Klaas and others bought in, since it was very much on the mentoring topic, and that would have been so much better.

The proposal I sent includes the word mentoring right? This is an intentions declaration. But we are focusing now in the topics we think must be done first.

I understand that

I understand for you the priority is the mentoring topic, and for many others probably. But please do not get upset with us because we publish the things we wold like to work on if we come to agreements.

Off course, and yes it is not just because of mentoring, see below on karma and membership, most of the things are there, and I believe you must know it by now, I have my take on them as well.

In any case, we have one or two more topics to go before proposing the "how". we can look for an alternative way of publishing if you think so. Our team blog is an option. I wonder how we could get feedback though.

We are quiet busy digesting the feedback at the moment, commenting the suggestions, talking to people about the ideas, summarizing....

It is the same with us, so allow us time, remember that we have lives other than openSUSE, bombarding everyone suddenly will frustate most of us. One after the other suggestion is getting too much for me atleast and overbearing.

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com

-- Regards Manu Gupta -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

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"Ancor" == Ancor Gonzalez Sosa writes: <snip> Yet Another Proposal Mail (YaPM)

Ancor> Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution with a Ancor> karma-driven development process?

With this bombarding of YaPM's it will be a bad karma at the end. Common be realistic let's sort out the ones in hand then we can have other issues. It looks you guys are just brainstorming and hitting the send key.

Togan

About the avalanche of ideas and they way they are communicated: 1. Yes, these ideas should have been brought to the community during the last 6 months not in 2 weeks. Sorry for that 2. Yes, the way they are brought makes them seem disconnected from earlier thoughts and efforts in these areas. Believe me, that is NOT due to the openSUSE team being disconnected but due to the process and how it is managed. Again, sorry for that. I fully understand the problems with the approach taken and if I could have avoided it, I would have. However, we have to deal with it as constructively as possible, I hope you can bear with us on this. As Agustin has said, we will do what we can to summarize and continue the discussions in a way that helps us get to a reasonable outcome. Loads of hugs, Jos -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/05/2013 01:36 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Adam Spiers wrote:

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Bruno Friedmann (bruno@ioda-net.ch) wrote:

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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

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"Bruno" == Bruno Friedmann writes:

Bruno> Sorry to insist, but you reduce (use translate if you want) mankind Bruno> in numbers. I understand the points about making choice for team Bruno> like tsp and co. But I can't believe we are forced in the whole Bruno> community to follow those stupid school rules. Hey dad you can be Bruno> proud of me, I've got a good point... Come on. Bruno maybe we will get a new bike or a new computer or a nice present Bruno> I can't believe that we are not able to know who do the work. Did Bruno> we get real complaint about our top contributors getting not enough Bruno> gratitude? Be just assured about one thing, even if a packager has Bruno> pushed 10000 packages to factory, I will not blindly trust the Bruno> 10001! And also I would be able to trust a first submission of a Bruno> newcomer. There's NO difference in contribution. The number also Bruno> doesn't mean quality, nor constant quality of doing. Quantity != Quality. I am not a believer of karma, I believe everyone has a curriculum that s/he has to graduate. There is no time limit, one has to graduate to be free. To add my signature and there is always the freedom of choosing Have lot's of fun and forget the karma Togan -- Life is endless possibilities -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

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

Bruno Friedmann (bruno@ioda-net.ch) wrote:

Be just assured about one thing, even if a packager has pushed 10000 packages to factory, I will not blindly trust the 10001!

Sure, blind trust is pretty much always a bad idea in software ;-) But surely you would trust that packager more than a newcomer who hadn't pushed any packages yet? In other words, even though you would still not accept their submitreq without a review, surely your review process would benefit in some way from your experience of how competent that person is in the relevant areas? (AFAICS, anyone who answers no to this question is basically saying that they refuse to develop or value any kind of working relationship with any other person, and IMHO that kind of approach will not help us build the kind of community we want.)

And also I would be able to trust a first submission of a newcomer.

Presumably you would still feel the need to review their submission, so what exactly do you mean by "trust" in this sentence?

There's NO difference in contribution.

That seems like a slightly naive view to me, which misses the human element. What *is* a contribution? IMHO it's a lot more than just pressing keys and clicking buttons on a machine which happens to be connected to the internet. It's also very much about the way that the people involved interact. And we want to develop a community where the interactions between any two people increase in value over time, right? And I think that's essentially what a good karma system should embody: person A likes what they see person B doing, they decide to award karma to person B which is a token representing a strengthening bond between those two people. The stronger the bonds in the network, the stronger the community becomes.

The number also doesn't mean quality, nor constant quality of doing.

We all know the dangers of "lies, damn lies, and statistics". It's true that an exact number can't accurately represent many of the things which statistics aim to represent. But does that mean that all statistics are useless or harmful and should not be used? I'm still undecided about whether introducing karma is a good idea. I think the prospect of reproducing the kind of wild success seen in other communities (e.g. the Stack Exchange network) is very exciting, but I share some of the concerns too. However some of the responses I've seen on this list seem more emotional than factual. But then I only just joined the list, so maybe I still need to acclimatise ;-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

toganm@opensuse.org (toganm@opensuse.org) wrote:

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"Adam" == Adam Spiers writes:

Adam> I would be really interested to hear people's thoughts on why Adam> stackoverflow is such a huge success, and why that kind of success Adam> may or may not be possible to replicate in our community.

If not charm but karma is what it counts why reinvent the wheel just use it http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

Because (IIUC) it's not just Q&A we're trying to address, it's all areas of the community. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Robert Schweikert wrote:

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?

<snip>

...

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, let's just say I just gather all the karma points and keep them to myself ;) jk jk Likely it will be the other way around, I will just give them all out and leave zero for myself, lol. I like the idea of community (made up) incentives. It drives contribution and not only contribution but work in general. As an example, from my work. There is a system there that assigns people a certain amount of points for them to give out every week in recognition of someone's good work. For example this week I was given 1000 points that I am to distribute in recognition to other team members. At work, these points add up and you end up using them to buy popular items, like phones and so on. That's beside the point though. I also use deviantart.com and at d.com they use a system that grants badges depending on your performance. What about if we did something similar, much like in a game that after you are awarded so many points you get a funny badge ( I can come up with a design for these, lol.) That way you not only accumulate karma points but you also clear checkpoints. I know for myself that I like clearing checkpoints and keep going to get more. In the case of the community this would be done just to clear a checkpoint and not a very meaningful result comes out of that, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment that we, as a community, might need to start recognizing each other more visibly. It helps camaraderie. What about you clear checkpoints and get first a dwarf chameleon, then a veiled chameleon, then a two-horned chameleon, then a four-horned chameleon, then a panther chameleon, etc. You get the idea! :D Thank you! Andy (anditosan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 05.12.2013 20:31, Bruno Friedmann wrote:

I can't believe that we are not able to know who do the work. Did we get real complaint about our top contributors getting not enough gratitude? Be just assured about one thing, even if a packager has pushed 10000 packages to factory, I will not blindly trust the 10001! And also I would be able to trust a first submission of a newcomer. There's NO difference in contribution.

The number also doesn't mean quality, nor constant quality of doing. If you read that karma points == number of packages, then you misread

Of course you can. But if some newcomer comes along and submits a new kernel, it will be reviewed *REALLY DEEPLY* to understand where he's coming from and what his intentions are. If Michal submits a new kernel, it won't be even reviewed beside the version number. That's just the plain truth at the moment. While you might be an exception, everyone else I know increases his expectations if people did good work in the past. E.g. I'll gladly install stuff from home:seife, but I will be very reluctant to register home:coolguy. I just don't know coolguy. this whole thing. You shouldn't have stopped at the subject I guess. Bruno, I respect your bad experiences with Karma systems and your strong opinion about it. But you could pay back some respect in actually trying to understand what we want to achieve. And while Robert calls it spoon feeding, the Karma discussion is a discussion unrelated to the staging projects workflow. It's two different proposals, that might work together or not. The openSUSE team will very likely not work on it in the upcoming future, but it's an idea worth presenting and discussing - and as others said it was discussed before because if done right it can help the community. Just as it helps other communities. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/06/2013 03:02 AM, Stephan Kulow wrote:

On 05.12.2013 20:31, Bruno Friedmann wrote:

...

And while Robert calls it spoon feeding, the Karma discussion is a discussion unrelated to the staging projects workflow. It's two different proposals, that might work together or not.

Correct, Karma and the other things we are talking about are unrelated or tangentially related. Leaves the question of the motivation and benefits of introducing this topic now while we have a ton of other things going on instead of 6 months down the road? This is obviously open to speculation and since people like to speculate every now and then, let me do the honor. This is being thrown into the pot now because - there exists little sense of timing, or lack of "fingerspitzen Gefuehl", which is probably the best case scenario and represents one extreme - there exists an ulterior motive with the most controversial ideas being presented at the end of the cycle when people are getting tired of long e-mail threads, the worst case scenario representing the other extreme on the spectrum. Either way there are a million shades of Grey in between and people will draw their own conclusion 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

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote:

You might think it won't but there is a mountain of research and data suggesting that it does influence engagement and motivation. And not really in a way that is obvious at first sight. This is a complicated topic from a very complicated science (psychology, hello Jos! :-).

In the theory of motivation there is a distinction between 2 different type of motivations/rewards. There are "intrinsic" rewards like the feeling that you are getting better at something, that you control the progress you make, that what you achieve is matching your values. Also that you belong to something bigger, more important than yourself. Intrinsic motivation comes from within yourself.

[snipped some *great* stuff]

And motivation is even the very beginning of things you have to consider before you go ahead and implement something like this. Implementation wise, for instance, you have to offer rewards that matter to the action you reward them for (e.g. compulsion loops). If you don't they are meaningless to the recipient. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-BUJL54Tk0 for a nice summary about this.

That was a really interesting video! Especially when considering how what the speaker said applies to sites like stackoverflow, ohloh, etc. I find contributing to stackoverflow strangely addictive, and I think that's mostly due to the compulsion loops resulting from the privileges you gain when reaching reputation points thresholds. However they don't form strong positive feedback loops, because earning a new privilege typically doesn't help you earn points faster (with some exceptions earlier on). The other aspect of stackoverflow's addictiveness (from my PoV) is, as the speaker on that video says, that there's something in assigning numbers (scores) to people that often just makes people want a bigger number. Yes, there's evidence to suggest that this is more effective for repetitive tasks than ones which require creativity. But nevertheless noone can deny the success of stackoverflow. Where does that come from? I guess it's also due to a really good interface, aside from the game-ification aspects.

And here is where gamification in software gets complicated. You have to get to the point where your automated (software driven) rewards appear human, unexpected and and include direct feedback to what you issue them for. Because only then they increase intrinsic motivation. You have to match your extrinsic rewards to the intrinsic rewards of people or you destroy their motivation. This is especially true for beginner and women (groups we desperately need).

Right, that makes perfect sense. ohloh also assigns a sort of score (they call it "kudos"), and various badges, but noone seems to care much, and I suspect that's because they didn't match the extrinsic rewards to any intrinsic ones.

Like I've said in the beginning. It might be your intention to only achieve the things you are trying to achieve (measure trust, credit and guide people etc.) but in the end with any type of gamification system you will impact peoples engagement and motivation, it's inseparable. You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.

Agreed. Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post, which shows that the topic is a lot more complicated than most of us (me included) understand. Thanks a lot! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Friday 06 December 2013 22:33:03 Adam Spiers wrote:

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote: <snip>

...

Like I've said in the beginning. It might be your intention to only achieve the things you are trying to achieve (measure trust, credit and guide people etc.) but in the end with any type of gamification system you will impact peoples engagement and motivation, it's inseparable. You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.

Agreed.

Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post, which shows that the topic is a lot more complicated than most of us (me included) understand. Thanks a lot!

I concur, this was an insightful post. As I wrote in my email a bit earlier, I am very much aware of the many pro's and con's to these social issues. Even in the team we don't all want and expect the same things from this idea - which is why it would be good to have insights from people like henne and many others in this thread. What I was hoping to achieve with this discussion is to get some kind of agreement that, despite the possible downsides, there are aspects of karma-ish things we could use for good. I personally really do believe that. That doesn't mean it is simple and we should have a very close look at each of the things we might try to implement. As I wrote, starting small, keeping close to the community with a feedback loop of continuous scrutiny of our goals and implementations, those are crucial to get the benefits but not the downsides. I think we all agree that making contributions more visible is a good idea with few, if any, downsides. I would suggest to start there. Show on OBS projects how many users it has, show on user pages what he/she does in openSUSE: plain and simple 'making things more visible'. As mentioned, badges and 'tricks' like that only have limited application - mostly for relatively simple and boring tasks. I don't think it helps anybody to get a badge for building and contributing a new kernel. But perhaps it would be nice for a new user who made his or her first edits to the wiki to get this visible on his/her profile page? Stackoverflow and other projects have shown that there are ways to do better - let's try and learn from that. /J -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote:

On 08.12.2013 21:23, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

I think we all agree that making contributions more visible is a good idea with few, if any, downsides. I would suggest to start there. Show on OBS projects how many users it has, show on user pages what he/she does in openSUSE: plain and simple 'making things more visible'.

This proposal sounds much more like the "collect, display and see what happens" approach. And while it might be proposed with good intentions this approach is the usual way gamification goes awfully wrong, discourages people and produces other unwanted results.

You really have to think hard about what you want to encourage, how you will encourage it and what the compulsion loop looks like. How about we start with collecting and discussing ideas about that? Like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3p...

I'd happily contribute to a document like that if it wasn't read-only ... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote:

Hey A,

On 10.12.2013 12:05, Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote:

...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3p...

I'd happily contribute to a document like that if it wasn't read-only ...

Oops, fixed. I'm apparently too old this newfangled stuff ;-)

Thanks :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 09 December 2013 13:50:38 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 08.12.2013 21:23, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Friday 06 December 2013 22:33:03 Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote: <snip>

...

...

You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.

Agreed.

Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post

I concur, this was an insightful post.

Thanks, it just happens to be that gamification is one of my pipe-dreams for the OBS so I researched it a bit. There are other great summaries about this topic like Aza Raskin's: "Behavior Change Checklist" [1] or all of the works from Sebastian Deterding [2].

...

What I was hoping to achieve with this discussion is to get some kind of agreement that, despite the possible downsides, there are aspects of karma-ish things we could use for good. I personally really do believe that. Well we all can agree or disagree on possibilities, it doesn't really matter.

Actually, it does, Like it or not, but we on the openSUSE team will only get to put effort in this if it is accepted by the community. Simple as that. Anything else I do on my free time, which requires motivation and, well, time. If it is decided we will work on it, we will try to make a more concrete plan, get feedback and then put in work to execute it. Of course we'll work to try and get others involved in this as much as we can - but we'll do our part, with several people on this for weeks or months like we did with the openQA sprint for example. As WE need to plan our work, for US it is useful to have a clear go or no-go. This by the way goes for the other plans as well. I know this doesn't fit with the just-do-it philosophy but that isn't up to me :D -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:36:06 +0100 Jos Poortvliet wrote:

As WE need to plan our work, for US it is useful to have a clear go or no-go. This by the way goes for the other plans as well. I know this doesn't fit with the just-do-it philosophy but that isn't up to me :D

It fits on have-a-focus philosophy, which is expansion of just-do-it. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/12/13 13:10, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

just a little suggestion, when I was discussing the Karma idea during the GSoC the conclusion we came up with was to not have one overall karma for everything as it is hard to compare/weight organizing presence on event with fixing the bugs. So the think we did was to collect separate karma for marketing, development or documentation. Advantage of that is that you also clearly see, what are people most active/good at.

I believe that this is still a good idea as if we want to make it in use somewhere, being superambasador still doesn't say much about being good developer and vice versa.

I don't see karma as a good metric of being a developer or an event organiser anyway - isn't the idea of karma to give recognition for contributions and thereby motivation to contributors? To use the Stackoverflow example, you can earn 100s of points answering questions about openSUSE but it doesn't say anything about your LISP skills, it just shows you are a contributor of useful answers. Will -- Will Stephenson SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wednesday 11 December 2013 09:19:43 Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 12/10/2013 06:41 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Thursday 05 December 2013 14:57:16 Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

On 12/05/2013 01:39 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Togan Muftuoglu

wrote:

...

...

...

...

>>>> "Ancor" == Ancor Gonzalez Sosa writes: <snip>

...

Yet Another Proposal Mail (YaPM)

Ancor> Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution with a Ancor> karma-driven development process?

With this bombarding of YaPM's it will be a bad karma at the end. Common be realistic let's sort out the ones in hand then we can have other issues. It looks you guys are just brainstorming and hitting the send key.

Togan

About the avalanche of ideas and they way they are communicated: 1. Yes, these ideas should have been brought to the community during the last 6 months not in 2 weeks. Sorry for that 2. Yes, the way they are brought makes them seem disconnected from earlier thoughts and efforts in these areas. Believe me, that is NOT due to the openSUSE team being disconnected but due to the process and how it is managed. Again, sorry for that.

I fully understand the problems with the approach taken and if I could have avoided it, I would have.

However, we have to deal with it as constructively as possible, I hope you can bear with us on this. As Agustin has said, we will do what we can to summarize and continue the discussions in a way that helps us get to a reasonable outcome.

Look, obviously more and more people are getting tired of the spoon feeding that has created a flood of messages. Produced some good ideas, now doubt, and overall we have mostly stayed on topic, an improvement over past discussions in this direction.

While I do not want to put words in other people's mouth I am getting really close to doing just that. I'd say those that pull the strings just need to get over it, present the agenda that quite obviously exists, preferably in a way that does not hit people over the head, and present it in a clear concise way. If you need help, I am happy to help out. If it continues like this I might just be obliged to throw a wrench into "the plan".

Essentially, we have no more proposals,

Looks like more is coming..... change process proposal now....

As that document says, it's based on the feedback we got: many of you are worried about the process. So, technically, yeah, it's a proposal about our change process. But you asked for it ;-)

Later, Robert -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Will Stephenson - 14:52 11.12.13 wrote:

I don't see karma as a good metric of being a developer or an event organiser anyway - isn't the idea of karma to give recognition for contributions and thereby motivation to contributors?

To use the Stackoverflow example, you can earn 100s of points answering questions about openSUSE but it doesn't say anything about your LISP skills, it just shows you are a contributor of useful answers.

Yep, but you are still providing the answers - same type of contribution, but it gets much trickier with completely different kind of contribution. Who gets more points - developer for fixing a bug or ambassador for running and organizing the booth on the event over the whole weekend? How much is translation worth? With separate karmas we basically avoided comparing apples and oranges :-) -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

How would this work for people that are on the openSUSE forums? I do a bit work each day for openSUSE on the three to four facebook pages I help admin. How would I get points? On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 12/11/2013 09:54 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Wednesday 11 December 2013 09:19:43 Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

On 12/10/2013 06:41 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Thursday 05 December 2013 14:57:16 Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

On 12/05/2013 01:39 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Togan Muftuoglu

wrote:

...

...

>>>>>> >>>>>> "Ancor" == Ancor Gonzalez Sosa writes:

<snip>

> Yet Another Proposal Mail (YaPM) > > Ancor> Would you like openSUSE to be the first distribution > with > a > Ancor> karma-driven development process? > > With this bombarding of YaPM's it will be a bad karma at the end. > Common > be > realistic let's sort out the ones in hand then we can have other > issues. > It > looks you guys are just brainstorming and hitting the send key. > > Togan

About the avalanche of ideas and they way they are communicated: 1. Yes, these ideas should have been brought to the community during the last 6 months not in 2 weeks. Sorry for that 2. Yes, the way they are brought makes them seem disconnected from earlier thoughts and efforts in these areas. Believe me, that is NOT due to the openSUSE team being disconnected but due to the process and how it is managed. Again, sorry for that.

I fully understand the problems with the approach taken and if I could have avoided it, I would have.

However, we have to deal with it as constructively as possible, I hope you can bear with us on this. As Agustin has said, we will do what we can to summarize and continue the discussions in a way that helps us get to a reasonable outcome.

Look, obviously more and more people are getting tired of the spoon feeding that has created a flood of messages. Produced some good ideas, now doubt, and overall we have mostly stayed on topic, an improvement over past discussions in this direction.

While I do not want to put words in other people's mouth I am getting really close to doing just that. I'd say those that pull the strings just need to get over it, present the agenda that quite obviously exists, preferably in a way that does not hit people over the head, and present it in a clear concise way. If you need help, I am happy to help out. If it continues like this I might just be obliged to throw a wrench into "the plan".

Essentially, we have no more proposals,

Looks like more is coming..... change process proposal now....

As that document says, it's based on the feedback we got: many of you are worried about the process. So, technically, yeah, it's a proposal about our change process. But you asked for it ;-)

No, two or 3 people addressed the topic and no one complained when it was proposed to postpone the topic until after the current flurry of "data dump mode".

And postpone did not imply a week later.

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

-- Terror PUP a.k.a Chuck "PUP" Payne (678) 636-9678 ----------------------------------------- Discover it! Enjoy it! Share it! openSUSE Linux. ----------------------------------------- openSUSE -- en.opensuse.org/User:Terrorpup openSUSE Ambassador/openSUSE Member Community Manager -- Southeast Linux Foundation (SELF) skype,twiiter,identica,friendfeed -- terrorpup freenode(irc) --terrorpup/lupinstein Register Linux Userid: 155363 Have you tried SUSE Studio? Need to create a Live CD, an app you want to package and distribute , or create your own linux distro. Give SUSE Studio a try. www.susestudio.com. See you at Southeast Linux Fest, June 7-9, 2013 in Charlotte, NC. www.southeastlinuxfest.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Chuck, On Wednesday, December 11, 2013 01:30:28 PM Chuck Payne wrote:

How would this work for people that are on the openSUSE forums? I do a bit work each day for openSUSE on the three to four facebook pages I help admin. How would I get points?

The proposal is restricted to the development distribution, the "new factory". If the implementation works, the project would have a good base for expanding the concept if it is requested. Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hey, On 11.12.2013 16:13, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

Who gets more points

Maybe I need to put this more bluntly: Simply attaching points to contributions does great harm. Only if points help people to do better&more contributions they do good. Stop thinking about points, start thinking about what to do with them. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, 12 Dec 2013 09:27:19 +0100 Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:

If we agree that Karmafication is worthy in the long term (we haven't yet), it would mean investing manpower now for harvesting bigger "real user benefits" in the future.

It is worthy. It will help to see who is who without long digging trough Google search results, OBS, wiki, mail lists, forums etc, or hanging around packaging related communication channels. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 09 December 2013 13:50:38 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 08.12.2013 21:23, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Friday 06 December 2013 22:33:03 Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote: <snip>

...

...

You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.

Agreed.

Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post

I concur, this was an insightful post.

Thanks, it just happens to be that gamification is one of my pipe-dreams for the OBS so I researched it a bit. There are other great summaries about this topic like Aza Raskin's: "Behavior Change Checklist" [1] or all of the works from Sebastian Deterding [2].

...

What I was hoping to achieve with this discussion is to get some kind of agreement that, despite the possible downsides, there are aspects of karma-ish things we could use for good. I personally really do believe that. Well we all can agree or disagree on possibilities, it doesn't really matter.

...

I think we all agree that making contributions more visible is a good idea with few, if any, downsides. I would suggest to start there. Show on OBS projects how many users it has, show on user pages what he/she does in openSUSE: plain and simple 'making things more visible'.

This proposal sounds much more like the "collect, display and see what happens" approach. And while it might be proposed with good intentions this approach is the usual way gamification goes awfully wrong, discourages people and produces other unwanted results.

You really have to think hard about what you want to encourage, how you will encourage it and what the compulsion loop looks like. How about we start with collecting and discussing ideas about that? Like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3 pGaHlJOXBORkE#gid=0

I went over the list. Now I'm not a huge fan of the points system, to be honest. As (I think) you wrote, it is important that what you 'get' fits with what you do. Points are very abstract, while there are far more concrete things you can do. I would start with just showing what people do. That doesn't have to be a 'just collect, display and see what happens', any more than that rewarding points has to be 'just give out, display and see what happens'. We can think about what we want to encourage and how just as much. So instead of awarding arbitrary 'points' for fixing bugs, I would rather show on somebody's profile how many bugs he/she has closed marked 'fixed' with a SR for example. And let's have a weekly top-ten of bugfixers on build.opensuse.org! Also, as we want people to also help keep factory stable, fixing factory bugs counts double. And we want people to help keep factory stable - ESPECIALLY when they don't maintain packages. So fixing a bug in a package you don't maintain counts double, in factory - that's times four. To reward ambassadors for giving talks at events, I'd rather allow them to upload a picture of themselves giving a talk to their profile page for each talk they gave; and have an overview of the events they attended as ambassador. When they went to 6 events over 3 years and gave 4 talks, they become 'elite' ambassador. I know it easily becomes childish/tacky so we have to do this in a careful, respectful way. But I think it can work. And yes, if you dominate the top-ten bug fixers for half a year, we can send you a nice t-shirt that says something like "I scare bugs" ;-) Now, points vs 'number of bugs fixed' - both are numbers, esp if we double them in certain conditions, so we are probably talking about the same thing here... ;-) I just missed the "where do you show it" in the spread sheet. /J

Henne

[1] http://schedule.sxsw.com/2011/events/event_IAP000453 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY

Moin, On 14.01.2014 10:24, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Monday 09 December 2013 13:50:38 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3 pGaHlJOXBORkE#gid=0

I went over the list. Now I'm not a huge fan of the points system, to be honest.

Points are just a means to measure. In the document above only the rows that have entries in the "More!" column make any sense. And even them are mostly too questionable for my taste.

So instead of awarding arbitrary 'points' for fixing bugs, I would rather show on somebody's profile how many bugs he/she has closed marked 'fixed' with a SR for example. And let's have a weekly top-ten of bugfixers on build.opensuse.org! [...] When they went to 6 events over 3 years and gave 4 talks, they become 'elite' ambassador.

Closed bugs by SRs are arbitrary points. A top-ten lists is an arbitrary leader-board. 'Elite Ambassador' is an arbitrary badge. All those things have their ramifications, if you want to ignore them: go ahead the way of the gamification-dodo...

Now, points vs 'number of bugs fixed' - both are numbers, esp if we double them in certain conditions, so we are probably talking about the same thing here... ;-)

Exactly, glad you have convinced yourself in the end ;-) Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 01/14/2014 04:24 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Monday 09 December 2013 13:50:38 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

Hey,

On 08.12.2013 21:23, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Friday 06 December 2013 22:33:03 Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote: <snip>

...

...

You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.

Agreed.

Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post

I concur, this was an insightful post.

Thanks, it just happens to be that gamification is one of my pipe-dreams for the OBS so I researched it a bit. There are other great summaries about this topic like Aza Raskin's: "Behavior Change Checklist" [1] or all of the works from Sebastian Deterding [2].

...

What I was hoping to achieve with this discussion is to get some kind of agreement that, despite the possible downsides, there are aspects of karma-ish things we could use for good. I personally really do believe that. Well we all can agree or disagree on possibilities, it doesn't really matter.

...

I think we all agree that making contributions more visible is a good idea with few, if any, downsides. I would suggest to start there. Show on OBS projects how many users it has, show on user pages what he/she does in openSUSE: plain and simple 'making things more visible'.

This proposal sounds much more like the "collect, display and see what happens" approach. And while it might be proposed with good intentions this approach is the usual way gamification goes awfully wrong, discourages people and produces other unwanted results.

You really have to think hard about what you want to encourage, how you will encourage it and what the compulsion loop looks like. How about we start with collecting and discussing ideas about that? Like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3 pGaHlJOXBORkE#gid=0

I went over the list. Now I'm not a huge fan of the points system, to be honest. As (I think) you wrote, it is important that what you 'get' fits with what you do. Points are very abstract, while there are far more concrete things you can do.

I would start with just showing what people do. That doesn't have to be a 'just collect, display and see what happens', any more than that rewarding points has to be 'just give out, display and see what happens'. We can think about what we want to encourage and how just as much.

So instead of awarding arbitrary 'points' for fixing bugs, I would rather show on somebody's profile how many bugs he/she has closed marked 'fixed' with a SR for example. And let's have a weekly top-ten of bugfixers on build.opensuse.org! Also, as we want people to also help keep factory stable, fixing factory bugs counts double. And we want people to help keep factory stable - ESPECIALLY when they don't maintain packages. So fixing a bug in a package you don't maintain counts double, in factory - that's times four.

To reward ambassadors for giving talks at events, I'd rather allow them to upload a picture of themselves giving a talk to their profile page for each talk they gave; and have an overview of the events they attended as ambassador. When they went to 6 events over 3 years and gave 4 talks, they become 'elite' ambassador.

I know it easily becomes childish/tacky so we have to do this in a careful, respectful way. But I think it can work. And yes, if you dominate the top-ten bug fixers for half a year, we can send you a nice t-shirt that says something like "I scare bugs" ;-)

Now, points vs 'number of bugs fixed' - both are numbers, esp if we double them in certain conditions, so we are probably talking about the same thing here... ;-) I just missed the "where do you show it" in the spread sheet.

After reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink recently I am more convinced than ever that we should stay away from anything that has any kind of awards, rewards, points, or whatever attached to it. Systems of "do this - get that" barely work in the "pay for world" of employment. 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

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 09:52:46 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

After reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink recently I am more convinced than ever that we should stay away from anything that has any kind of awards, rewards, points, or whatever attached to it.

Systems of "do this - get that" barely work in the "pay for world" of employment.

I would also tend to agree with that (also having read Drive). Recognition tends to be more valuable and a better motivator than points. Points also tend to make for a more competitive environment rather than a cooperative environment, and a cooperative environment is what I think we need to be aiming at. Otherwise, there's the danger of (for example) people working on bugs not working together to resolve them because "they want the points" (I know a few people who are strongly motivated by "points" - I guess because "points mean prizes" to some people. That said, there does perhaps need to be a method for measuring contribution. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 13:09:04 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

That said, there does perhaps need to be a method for measuring contribution.

I have no problem with showing what people do. I think just showing the person "logging in to connect" or whatever system what they've done, or showing how many people use ones packages, yet another discussion started in another thread, turns into a self motivating factor. People will try to "better themselves". I think as soon as the system moves toward comparison to others with top 10 lists, points, or what not it turns into an "if - then" system. I believe "if - then" systems miss the mark and probably are more demotivating for a large number of people rather than being motivating.

I agree. It can be tricky, though, to move people from a mindset of it being a zero-sum game. I think that's where the comparison becomes a problem -if it's "I can close more bugs than Robert does," then it becomes a destructive zero-sum game. The motivator needs to not only be personal, but it needs to be reflected as a "team" (or "project") goal. That might mean, for example, comparing the project itself to past performance - closing a higher percentage of open bugs, having a lower number of bugs at the 3, 6, 9, and 12 month marks, or something like that. Tracking community involvement as a part of overall project participation, and having the goal, for example, of an increase in participation across the project. If it becomes a competition between Jim and Robert taking ownership of bugs that both can contribute to the solution of (but working on independently rather than jointly), then the project loses, because the expertise isn't used effectively. Assuming, of course, that there are bugs that Jim and Robert might collaborate on together to resolve (probably unlikely, since I don't consider myself a developer or coder). ;) But then recognizing major issues that have been resolved and by whom - in the context of the overall project - that might have value. Something like a list of collaborators in the release notes, or acknowledgment of the contributions of those who made the release possible. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Jos Poortvliet wrote:

So instead of awarding arbitrary 'points' for fixing bugs, I would rather show on somebody's profile how many bugs he/she has closed marked 'fixed' with a SR for example.

If fixing bugs should give points, so should reporting bugs. Both require some qualification though. Do bugs closed as WONTFIX count as negative points? We should also look at the time taken to fix a bug, anything more than 6 months shouldn't count. Perhaps. How about bugs assigned personally having been ignored for too long? You may have just been peering into a can of worms here.

I know it easily becomes childish/tacky so we have to do this in a careful, respectful way. But I think it can work. And yes, if you dominate the top-ten bug fixers for half a year, we can send you a nice t-shirt that says something like "I scare bugs" ;-)

Smiley noted. I think, perhaps(!) you are forgetting the age-span of the people contributing here. There are no doubt people who could work with these points, even feel up to wearing the t-shirt, but for someone who has been in the industry for 15-20-25 years, fixing a bug is hardly a big deal. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.8°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 09:52 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

After reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink recently I am more convinced than ever that we should stay away from anything that has any kind of awards, rewards, points, or whatever attached to it.

Systems of "do this - get that" barely work in the "pay for world" of employment.

Later, Robert

I recently read this blog post which sums up my fears on the topic of Karmafication framed in an example of a project that seems to have made all the mistakes people are worrying about here http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflo... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tuesday 14 January 2014 19:16:28 Jim Henderson wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 13:09:04 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

...

That said, there does perhaps need to be a method for measuring contribution.

I have no problem with showing what people do. I think just showing the person "logging in to connect" or whatever system what they've done, or showing how many people use ones packages, yet another discussion started in another thread, turns into a self motivating factor. People will try to "better themselves". I think as soon as the system moves toward comparison to others with top 10 lists, points, or what not it turns into an "if - then" system. I believe "if - then" systems miss the mark and probably are more demotivating for a large number of people rather than being motivating.

I agree.

It can be tricky, though, to move people from a mindset of it being a zero-sum game. I think that's where the comparison becomes a problem -if it's "I can close more bugs than Robert does," then it becomes a destructive zero-sum game. The motivator needs to not only be personal, but it needs to be reflected as a "team" (or "project") goal. That might mean, for example, comparing the project itself to past performance - closing a higher percentage of open bugs, having a lower number of bugs at the 3, 6, 9, and 12 month marks, or something like that. Tracking community involvement as a part of overall project participation, and having the goal, for example, of an increase in participation across the project.

If it becomes a competition between Jim and Robert taking ownership of bugs that both can contribute to the solution of (but working on independently rather than jointly), then the project loses, because the expertise isn't used effectively. Assuming, of course, that there are bugs that Jim and Robert might collaborate on together to resolve (probably unlikely, since I don't consider myself a developer or coder). ;)

I think there is a mis-match between what we (Henne, myself and others) are trying to achieve and what you (and Robert and others) seem to read into it.

But then recognizing major issues that have been resolved and by whom - in the context of the overall project - that might have value. Something like a list of collaborators in the release notes, or acknowledgment of the contributions of those who made the release possible.

Exactly. In every Free Software project, credit where it is due (and the respect of your peers) plays a huge role. So does seeing the impact of what you do. While there are many different reasons why people contribute, these two are shared by at least a majority of our contributors. That is what this is about: making visible what impact your work has (eg show the number of users of packages on OBS) and allowing others to see what you do (eg show packages you maintain on your profile).

From there on, we can do more elaborate things with this information, like calculate an activity metric or make a top-ten of bugfixers. Or not. That is something we can decide in a later stage, and even experiment with and get rid off if it doesn't work.

Also, please realize that motivation differs between people. Some do find a top-ten kind'a cool, others don't. The fact that you might not does not mean it does have no value for others. For a short spell AJ and myself put weekly contributor stats to Factory on news.o.o and we heard back from several people that they found it cool to get in there. I'm not saying it makes a huge difference, but why not recognize and motivate those who do appreciate this? Cheers, Jos

Jim

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 15.01.2014 10:57, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 10:38:19 Richard Brown wrote:

...

On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 09:52 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

After reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink recently I am more convinced than ever that we should stay away from anything that has any kind of awards, rewards, points, or whatever attached to it.

Systems of "do this - get that" barely work in the "pay for world" of employment.

Later, Robert

I recently read this blog post which sums up my fears on the topic of Karmafication framed in an example of a project that seems to have made all the mistakes people are worrying about here

http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverfl

ow/

Thanks, that's a very good read.

Please note that I feel stackoverflow goes much to far - it is practically at the other spectrum, compared to us. We make it hard to track what people do, they make it in-your-face obvious with gold and glitter. Something in between, I think, would be better. As usual :D

I find it also very interesting. E.g. you want to avoid rewarding for "bugs opened" or "comments in bugs" - because you never know how valuable these really were. Even the number of submit requests is of no meaning - e.g. Ciaran submits tons of license fixes and he's arguably a real expert in verifying and changing licenses. But that doesn't mean he is a good hacker (it doesn't mean he isn't either - you just can't judge from the information provided by the system). Greetings, Stephan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iD8DBQFS1l1ewFSBhlBjoJYRAo3fAJwKJt6p4NLNNI9dfoSeq1crwERKkwCgrizW Zq1A1gyQ5E547oDHVwd8oAo= =l25H -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

So when are you finally going to give up on this idea with all the counter-argument, experience and such that was given? It starts to feel to me that you're clinging on to it no matter what. There has been quite some research on the topic of motivating people through rewards (of whatever sorts) and having people perform work out of sheer altruism. As soon as you introduce rewards or, actually, the *incentive* of a reward (be it monetary, points, status, whatever), experiments have shown that another part of our brain takes over (the one that is linked to pleasure and addiction, the nucleus accumbens -- as opposed to the posterior superior temporal sulcus, which is responsible for social interactions), and then you get completely different behavior and mechanics: * people will be demotivated because the incentive is not enough (*) * competition (*) It seems very counter-intuitive that people would be motivated if there is no reward at all, and demotivated if there is a little reward, but there is consistent and pretty overwhelming research showing that that is how things happen. To be more precise, it is the anticipation of a reward that breaks everything (e.g. fine to take your daughter to disneyland to reward her of her good work at school, but it is a bad idea to tell her "I'll take you to disneyland *if* your results are good"). Carrot and stick is just nonsense from another age (namely the industrialization age), including when it is just the carrot. In any case, doesn't it sound like the risks are just overwhelmingly higher than any potential benefit? cheers, Pascal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 01/15/2014 12:20 PM, Pascal Bleser wrote:

So when are you finally going to give up on this idea with all the counter-argument, experience and such that was given? It starts to feel to me that you're clinging on to it no matter what.

It's not a matter of giving up with the idea or clinging to it. It's quite obvious that there is a lot of people that don't want to go that way for a lot of good reasons, so it will probably never happen. But some other people have raised topics that are related and that are very interesting, so there is no reason to just cut the conversation down. My (absolutely personal) feelings about the thread: - Most people agree that trying to quantify contributions with scores is not only impossible but also dangerous. - Most people agree that explicit rewards like badges are not a good idea either. - Most people agree that making contributions more visible would really help and are providing quite some feedback about how to do it. - Some people suggest that there are other aspects of gamification -more subtle, smart and effective that points and rewards- that could be researched. Not trying to speak in Jos' name, but some of us are interested in keeping the ideas' stream alive, which doesn't mean keeping the original "karmafication" idea alive. This discussion is probably leading to a better idea about how to improve the three things we were trying to improve with the original idea: decision making, guidance and motivation. And I'm pretty convinced that will not be karma on it. ;-) Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa openSUSE Team at SUSE Linux GmbH -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 15 Jan 2014 10:52:29 +0100, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

I think there is a mis-match between what we (Henne, myself and others) are trying to achieve and what you (and Robert and others) seem to read into it.

Please describe what that mismatch is. I'm not sure there is, but perhaps that is the case.

...

But then recognizing major issues that have been resolved and by whom - in the context of the overall project - that might have value. Something like a list of collaborators in the release notes, or acknowledgment of the contributions of those who made the release possible.

Exactly. In every Free Software project, credit where it is due (and the respect of your peers) plays a huge role. So does seeing the impact of what you do. While there are many different reasons why people contribute, these two are shared by at least a majority of our contributors.

That is what this is about: making visible what impact your work has (eg show the number of users of packages on OBS) and allowing others to see what you do (eg show packages you maintain on your profile).

From there on, we can do more elaborate things with this information, like calculate an activity metric or make a top-ten of bugfixers. Or not. That is something we can decide in a later stage, and even experiment with and get rid off if it doesn't work.

Measurement of contribution is a tricky thing. In the years I've been doing forums stuff, that's always been one of the larger challenges - quantifying the quality of a contribution. I see that discussion taking place here in another part of the thread. Usually the end result ends up being a quantitative measurement rather than a qualitative measure, because qualitative measurements are much more difficult to measure in a meaningful and precise manner, certainly without some sort of manual process (say, a peer review or a quality review). Qualitative data is very difficult to gather in an automated way. Another example is in performance measurement of training effectiveness (an example I use because I'm familiar with the methods used to measure instructor and course performance in a qualitative way). In that instance, you gather data from the students about their experience in the class. Ideally, to get a good measurement of the training effectiveness, you also have to come back a period of time after the course and identify how much of the students' job performance improvement since the class was due to what they learned in the class. It's possible to do that kind of qualitative analysis - but it's not easy. It's a problem that's been researched by economists (because ultimately, it's a measurement of efficiency, ROI, and cost), and a pretty sound methodology exists, but getting it wasn't without pain. Is fixing 10 bugs more valuable than fixing one bug? Answering this question requires an qualitative analysis of the bugs in question, the performance of the individuals fixing the bug, and a measurement of the skills. Fixing a kernel panic is more valuable than fixing 10 cosmetic bugs in the UI. So a measurement of the number of bugs fixed is ultimately meaningless without attention to the impact, severity, and skills needed to fix the issue. Similarly, fixing a kernel panic that's because someone improperly initialized a pointer might be seen as an easier fix than one that involves fixing a defect that happens as a result of the interactions within in an entire subsystem. That's the problem that setting up a competitive "top ten" type measurement introduces, and it's important at least to understand that. There's always the possibility that the one person who fixes a kernel panic issue is also going to be demotivated by their contribution being recognized in one of those "top ten" lists because they only fixed the one bug, while others fixed 10 or 20 bugs in the same time period - it's important to recognize that not all bugs are equal.

Also, please realize that motivation differs between people. Some do find a top-ten kind'a cool, others don't. The fact that you might not does not mean it does have no value for others. For a short spell AJ and myself put weekly contributor stats to Factory on news.o.o and we heard back from several people that they found it cool to get in there. I'm not saying it makes a huge difference, but why not recognize and motivate those who do appreciate this?

Ultimately, the goals of the project have to be met. If creating a competitive environment for people (for example) fixing bugs helps with that, then of course I'm for it. But more often than not, it's been my experience that when you set up a competitive environment (as happens so often in the business world), the approach does harm that wasn't intended. Sales people competing for clients end up not working together to get the really big score (because their motivation is their own commission, and there can only be one "salesperson of the year" - and they want it badly enough to not only try to keep the sales for themselves, but also to make it more difficult for coworkers to complete their sales. It's a tactic I've seen over and over again.) I'm not saying that sort of thing happens here, but that it's something to be aware of. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 18:35 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:

That's the problem that setting up a competitive "top ten" type measurement introduces, and it's important at least to understand that. There's always the possibility that the one person who fixes a kernel panic issue is also going to be demotivated by their contribution being recognized in one of those "top ten" lists because they only fixed the one bug, while others fixed 10 or 20 bugs in the same time period - it's important to recognize that not all bugs are equal.

This perfectly sums up why I really, truly, dislike the regular "Top Ten Contributors" list I see with every openSUSE Team @ SUSE Team Blog We want to, and should, recognise our packagers and we do value their contributions, but not all package updates are equal. A simple count of the number of packages changed does not reflect the impact those contributions make to the project. I'm speaking from experience; the few times my name has appeared on that Top Ten list has always been the result of regular, run-of-the-mill GNOME package maintenance - lots of packages getting pretty straight forward updates from it's upstream project. In terms of 'time and effort', despite the large number of packages, my total work in those cases has often been quite low - I'm often just confirming a review by at least one other person in the GNOME team, and the majority of the updates are straight forward incremental changes from Upstream. In a word, it's boring, simple, stuff. Stuff that needs to be done, yes, but worthy of my name reaching a 'Top Ten' list? I think not. Where as my actual contributions that have fixed big issues affecting our users, those kind of fixes that require lots of thought, effort, and time, normally end up folded up into small, single package updates (at least they should, if I'm doing things as efficiently as possible), which totally get missed by the Sum of Packages 'Top Ten' approach. With all that said, I don't feel that I'm 'missing out' by not being recognised for any single changes that have a big impact. I'm not contributing to openSUSE for praise/reward/fame or fortune, but mostly to fix the issues that affect me when I use openSUSE, to 'scratch my own itches', the classical Open Source motivation. Karmafication/Gamification is probably more meaningful/useful for capturing new individuals who might not share that self-sustaining motivation and keeping them involved until (hopefully) it becomes meaningless to them also. Problem is, any system of counting contributions is useless for that goal; It's probably a fair assumption to say new people won't contribute large amounts of stuff, as they probably wont know how. Not even a magical automated measure of 'contribution value' is going to be much help, as the chances are that new contributors are going to go for 'low hanging fruit'. But those are the contributions we need to focus on, it those new people are the ones who probably do need the ego boost of Gamification to keep them interested in the Project initially. But I don't have many answers on how we could change things to really make that idea work..this email has been one of those which has been written as I thought, so doesn't have a nice tidy conclusion.. Thanks for reading :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thursday 16 January 2014 11:04:54 Richard Brown wrote:

On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 18:35 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:

...

That's the problem that setting up a competitive "top ten" type measurement introduces, and it's important at least to understand that. There's always the possibility that the one person who fixes a kernel panic issue is also going to be demotivated by their contribution being recognized in one of those "top ten" lists because they only fixed the one bug, while others fixed 10 or 20 bugs in the same time period - it's important to recognize that not all bugs are equal.

This perfectly sums up why I really, truly, dislike the regular "Top Ten Contributors" list I see with every openSUSE Team @ SUSE Team Blog

We want to, and should, recognise our packagers and we do value their contributions, but not all package updates are equal.

A simple count of the number of packages changed does not reflect the impact those contributions make to the project.

I'm speaking from experience; the few times my name has appeared on that Top Ten list has always been the result of regular, run-of-the-mill GNOME package maintenance - lots of packages getting pretty straight forward updates from it's upstream project. In terms of 'time and effort', despite the large number of packages, my total work in those cases has often been quite low - I'm often just confirming a review by at least one other person in the GNOME team, and the majority of the updates are straight forward incremental changes from Upstream. In a word, it's boring, simple, stuff. Stuff that needs to be done, yes, but worthy of my name reaching a 'Top Ten' list? I think not.

Where as my actual contributions that have fixed big issues affecting our users, those kind of fixes that require lots of thought, effort, and time, normally end up folded up into small, single package updates (at least they should, if I'm doing things as efficiently as possible), which totally get missed by the Sum of Packages 'Top Ten' approach.

With all that said, I don't feel that I'm 'missing out' by not being recognised for any single changes that have a big impact. I'm not contributing to openSUSE for praise/reward/fame or fortune, but mostly to fix the issues that affect me when I use openSUSE, to 'scratch my own itches', the classical Open Source motivation.

Karmafication/Gamification is probably more meaningful/useful for capturing new individuals who might not share that self-sustaining motivation and keeping them involved until (hopefully) it becomes meaningless to them also. Problem is, any system of counting contributions is useless for that goal; It's probably a fair assumption to say new people won't contribute large amounts of stuff, as they probably wont know how. Not even a magical automated measure of 'contribution value' is going to be much help, as the chances are that new contributors are going to go for 'low hanging fruit'. But those are the contributions we need to focus on, it those new people are the ones who probably do need the ego boost of Gamification to keep them interested in the Project initially.

But I don't have many answers on how we could change things to really make that idea work..this email has been one of those which has been written as I thought, so doesn't have a nice tidy conclusion.. Thanks for reading :)

Actually, I do appreciate the thoughts here. You are very right on the top ten contributors, and you're not the first to say that. I can't decide on this (or anything) but I'll propose to remove it. /Jos

On 01/16/2014 06:56 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 13:17:05 Françoise Wybrecht wrote:

...

On 15/01/14 10:52, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

I think there is a mis-match

Hi Jos,

where would be the mis-match ? please could you explain where&how?

Well, your email below makes it pretty clear. You talk about Karma, I do not.

I don't want karma, just like everybody else here. I want to increase the visibility of people's work but that is an entirely different thing and the talk about Karma gets in the way of that.

Glad to see you changed your direction :) 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

On Wed, 15 Jan 2014 10:44:02 +0100 Jos Poortvliet wrote:

Sure. But this isn't either-or: to be able to value other people's work, you need to know what they do. That's the thing we want to do here: make it visible what people do.

This is becoming amusing Jos. Some want to evaluate contribution, the other not, but no one tried to describe system that one is trying to improve. I don't know examples of successful tune up without knowing how system works in general and every part of it in details. In other words, first create model (schematic diagram, with descriptions) of the system, then you can see where and how to improve it. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 01/17/2014 06:23 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:

On Thu, 16 Jan 2014 22:56:57 -0600, Rajko wrote:

...

Some want to evaluate contribution, the other not, but no one tried to describe system that one is trying to improve. That only works if there's a repeatable process in place to start with. It seems there isn't, so we can't start with describing a system that needs to be improved, but rather with a definition of the goals of such a system. It really seems that we need to build one, not fix one.

+1 And as a first step, focused in technical contributors, I would highly appreciate if people involved in factory do some brainstorming in this opensuse-factory thread: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2014-01/msg00064.html Don't stick to the mail's subject, we are not only interested in the opinion of packagers about their users. If you are involved in Factory (or would like to) -no matter if you are a devel project maintainer, a reviewer or a user/tester- and you miss some information to be easily accessible, just shoot. Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa openSUSE Team at SUSE Linux GmbH -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thursday 16 January 2014 08:19:32 Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 01/16/2014 06:56 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 13:17:05 Françoise Wybrecht wrote:

...

On 15/01/14 10:52, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

I think there is a mis-match

Hi Jos,

where would be the mis-match ? please could you explain where&how?

Well, your email below makes it pretty clear. You talk about Karma, I do not.

I don't want karma, just like everybody else here. I want to increase the visibility of people's work but that is an entirely different thing and the talk about Karma gets in the way of that.

Glad to see you changed your direction :)

I listen. Moreover, I am more than happy to admit I was wrong - I did a bit of reading up (and more talking with ppl about) the top-ten lists and yeah, that seems like a bad idea. So as far as I'm concerned, that is out.x A single karma score was never something I thought made sense, this is, well, call it a communication issue. The term 'karmafication' just sounds cool so I thought we should keep it in ;-) I also think I made clear that as far as karma-ish things go, I always wanted to use this only in areas where new people come in - like guiding contributors through the first steps of contributing. Compare it a bit with http://www.duolingo.com/ for example (I now am learning Portugese with their android app and it's cool :D). It also might make sense in a few other areas like wiki and such. But I always have been and still am critical about its effects on more experienced contributors. Anyway. For now, I'm ok to drop all Karma stuff and just start with improvements like commenting on OBS projects, showing the nr of downloads, stuff like that. See where it goes and at all times - be prepared to remove stuff again if it causes issues. I hope you will all now stop banging on my head :D Hugs, /J

Later, Robert