You probably already know from Pavols post, that we are going to work openSUSE Connect during Froscon. Anybody can join us. Only basic php knowledge and will to learn new things is required. Or maybe you can contribute somehow even without php, just with html and css. Anyway, what I was investigating lately was the Karma concept in new openSUSE Connect. We want some Karma. We want it to collect some karma point from all different aspect of openSUSE Contribution. So this post is about one little bit crazy idea that came to my mind. It’s going to be about Connect and Karma and I’m NOT promising that any of this will come to the existence.
How to do it
First thing is how one can get some Karma points. Obviously it should be through openSUSE Contribution. So we need to collect wiki edits, build service commits/submitrequests, bugzilla entries, blog posts at planet SuSE, git commits and maybe some other things I currently forgot. And we would like to make it quite automatic. So as we need quite some special things. I took a look at some existing Karma plugin and it’s quite easy to write a plugin for Elgg (our new platform for connect). So I think that the best option would be to write whole plugin by ourselves. We couldn’t reuse much code anyway and if we are going to do it by ourselves, we can go wild with feature list 😉
Features
I already said that we want to collect Karma from various sources. But how we are going to decide whether creating this wiki page values the same as the creation of this package or fixing this particular bug? Not easy to do. So I think that it would be nice to have different Karma points for different activities. So everybody can have some wiki karma and some build service karma and such. But that is also not sufficient. Take for example build service karma. One can do simple package update of package that nobody really cares about and on the other hand somebody can make fix to ugly gcc bug that takes week to hunt down and that will fix hundreds of packages. I’m exaggerating a little bit. But in wiki you can fix one typo or write a whole page from scratch. And the people doing more work should get more reward, don’t you think?
How to do it? I think we can allow anybody to send some of their karma points to anybody else. So if you see somebody doing something you really like, you can send them a little reward by yourself. We can also add some extra points to the groups and let them have their own budget and reward people somehow from it (maybe we can add some points to the groups according to the number of their skilled member). So this is how I think that Karma point could work.
What to do with them
And now, why do want these Karma points? What are they going be good for? Well they can be part of your dashboard, so anybody who will found you in Connect can see how big contributor you are. But having just some numbers is quite a boring. So how can we make a little bit more entertaining? Do you remember Geeko Builder? I think we can use something similar. Let’s say that every user will get some naked Geeko in the beginning. And then he can buy some things using his Karma. Like buy him some clothes, weapons, jewelry… And every piece of equipment will cost some Karma points. But it can cost different types of Karma. So as the packager you will not get a wizards hat as you will need to many wiki Karma for that. On the other hand as a wiki contributor, you will have too few obs karma points to buy a sword. You will be also able to improve not only your appearance, but also properties of your Geeko like a wisdom or strength. We will have to make sure, that all these properties are accessible from the outside, so anybody can create game in which you can use your Connect profile Geeko. I think creating some battle arena should be easy…
Work, work, work
It would be quite some work to make something like this to happen. But I think we want the first part anyway. And it shouldn’t be hard really hard to do it. Second part will need people with great imagination and people who know how to draw things. So this part would be harder I think.
What I want to achieve with this post? I want to attract people to think about Connect. I want you to get interested. I want even some of you to show up at our hack session at Froscon. But most of all, I want some feedback, what do you think about these crazy ideas of mine 😉