launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 6:58 AM, Matthew Revell
<matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 15 February 2012 11:36, Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Robert Collins
>> <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> .... include blueprints and bugs in the same bucket for karma
>>> normalisation. (On the basis that blueprints aren't distinctly more
>>> valuable than bug reports to a project).
>>>
>>> I realise this ignores the bigger questions around karma, but it seems
>>> like a cheapish thing to me.
>>
>> Maybe drop rebalancing altogether?
>
> What was the intention behind rebalancing? To encourage more activity
> in the lesser used parts of LP? To show that even a relatively small
> amount of activity has a larger impact in a lesser used part of LP?

I believe that was a component, but the larger one was to make effort
spent on different areas of LP 'fair' - that is someone that spends
all day translating should earn the same karma as someone that spends
all day on blueprints, or all day on bugs: there shouldn't be a
pathological incentive to neglect or focus on one part of the system.
The algorithm tries to achieve this by grouping karma (translations,
soyuz, bugs, code, blueprints) and observing the actual activity, then
scaling each group to have the same total impact; this doesn't seem to
work well in practice, because we're not scaling an individual's day
of effort, we're scaling *all contributions to the area* - when the
contributions are unbalanced - that is, if 95% of the work is going
into bugs, say, then someone doing a days work in blueprints gets 20
times the karma they would have for a days work on bugs.

> What does rebalancing give us? Seemingly unfair karma scores.

s/Seemingly// :)

> I wonder if karma's time has passed. We know that some people value it
> but perhaps it's one of those things that doesn't justify its
> maintenance costs. Are people *really* motivated by karma? If so,
> karma is such a poor reflection of value provided that I imagine karma
> only serves to disappoint most people who find it genuinely
> motivating.
>
> If we did kill karma, I'd lobby to keep the list of karma earning
> actions at ~/+karma; the most useful aspect of karma, to my mind.
>
> If the karma score went away, but we kept the activity list, would
> anyone miss it?

I doubt this list is the right forum to ask. That said, as an Ubuntu
regional board member, I do value the current karma score as one of
the things I look at when assessing an individuals contribution to
Ubuntu. I would like to be able to see more of the actions, not just
the last 30 or so. If I could scroll back several months in the
actions, I wouldn't care about the summary number as much.

-Rob