I wonder—would it be useful for people to receive karma points for programming contributions to the LW community? It sounds reasonable to me.
An interesting question is, how do you determine the number of karma points the work deserves? One approach would be that one of the site admins could assign it a value. Another would be that it could be voted upon.
Essentially the description of the ‘feature’ to be added would be a post, and it’s score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it. Vote up if you think that score is too little, vote down if you think it is too much. This would also give you a way to rank the ‘feature requests’ - those with the highest scores are the ones the community cares about most (of course that may not matter much if there’s only the occasional bit of programming work to be done).
I realise that there’d be costs and effort required to get any system like this going. E.g. you probably want such feature request ‘posts’ on a different part of the site, and you’d have to explain the scheme to people, etc.
This idea of providing karma points like this wouldn’t have to apply to just programming tasks—it could be anything else that isn’t a post or a comment but which is nonetheless a contribution to the community.
I wonder—would it be useful for people to receive karma points for programming contributions to the LW community? It sounds reasonable to me.
An interesting question is, how do you determine the number of karma points the work deserves? One approach would be that one of the site admins could assign it a value. Another would be that it could be voted upon.
Essentially the description of the ‘feature’ to be added would be a post, and it’s score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it. Vote up if you think that score is too little, vote down if you think it is too much. This would also give you a way to rank the ‘feature requests’ - those with the highest scores are the ones the community cares about most (of course that may not matter much if there’s only the occasional bit of programming work to be done).
I realise that there’d be costs and effort required to get any system like this going. E.g. you probably want such feature request ‘posts’ on a different part of the site, and you’d have to explain the scheme to people, etc.
This idea of providing karma points like this wouldn’t have to apply to just programming tasks—it could be anything else that isn’t a post or a comment but which is nonetheless a contribution to the community.
upon reflection, a poll might be better. along the lines of:
how many points is the implementation of this feature worth?
10
20
50
100
150