launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 November 2011 19:36, curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This post of something I just posted to my blog. I am not very
> interested in a discussion as there is an 87% chance is will devolve
> into a bike shed argument. I you are inspired to act on this, rather
> than discuss it, I will get your branch released.

I've delayed replying to this because what I'm offering is partly
discussion; but I'm not interested in bikeshedding, either.


> implemented…awarding me with 300 points. Launchpad is misinforming you
> and everyone else about the value of your contributions. The numbers
> will always be subjective. Stop reading those karma numbers, stop trying
> to raise them; you will not win anything for having a high score.
>
> * I want to stop recording values for action, at the very least, never
>  show them.
> * I want to stop expending valuable CPU time balancing karma.
> * I want to stop expiring karma.

Let's kill karma. It was pretty interesting back in Launchpad's early
days; it was an early example of gamification (not a term I like) on
the web, you could argue. Right now, though, it's not doing the
intended job.

Karma was meant to show a person's current standing in those open
source projects represented in Launchpad. We can do that in more
direct and useful ways without assigning an arbitrary and misleading
number to people.

> Once we stop talking about value and fairness, we are free to add new
> kinds of actions that we want Launchpad to record. I hope to know that
> someone has registered a project, set the branch used as development
> focus, added a recipe to build it, and made an official release.
>
> * I want to see a listing of all the things I register or change in
>  Launchpad.
> * I want to see a list of actions that someone has done today, this
>  week, this month, this year, and maybe even last year.
> * I want to filter the actions by to specific categories that pertain
>  to bugs, code, or planning.
> * I want see a link to the thing the action was about.

Right, so this is our (somewhat vague) Dashboards and Activity Walls projects.

This is where I might take the thread into discussion: do we still
want a short-hand way to show someone's standing? I don't mean a score
but rather something that has direct meaning:

 * "Curtis closes ten bugs a day"
 * or "Curtis is Launchpad's top bug closer"
 * or "Curtis closed more bugs this week than anyone else".

So, it helps show someone's standing but it's in context; it's
somewhat more useful than a karma score but it's also pretty easy to
digest.

We could take further but I'd like to understand better what benefit
we'd get from that sort of thing.

Of course, you've suggested something similar in the past.

I'll buy a beer in Budapest (I know, a whole 40p) for the person that
lands a branch that:

 * replaces the "Karma:" heading on the person page with a link that
reads "View $person's recent activity"
 * kills the display of the karma score directly beneath and the
associated help link
 * on +karma removes the references to karma, the karma table and the
karma score and makes it look like a recent activity list.

No need to announce it. Let's just see what happens. It'll be a pretty
limited activity list but we intend to do activity walls properly.

We'll get complaints -- that's my intention. I want to see, though, if
anything of value is lost, rather than people who misunderstand the
usefulness of karma being upset that it's gone.

If it turns out that nothing of value has been lost, we can rip out
the code that calculates, balances and decays karma.

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell