Help Us Shape TYPO3 Karma

Karma will become a part of your typo3.org user account before the end of 2019. It is a way to measure and visualize your contribution to the TYPO3 project and community. We hope it will encourage involvement through gamification that is rewarding for both you and your employer.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://typo3.org/article/help-us-shape-typo3-karma/

Just some ideas:

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First question is, where do you draw the line? At first read, this seems limited to code contributions. But is it? Sprints are mentioned: will this e.g. include design sprints? Proofreading an article (on typo3.org) seems to get you karma, too.

What about the following, vital contributions to the TYPO3 eco system?

  • Providing support at Slack
  • Providing support at Stack Overflow
  • Providing support at a forum
  • Writing blogs
  • Making videos
  • Writing extensions and helpers of any kind
  • Sponsoring meals for sprints
  • (and more)

Would you consider these karma worthy?
And how would you track above contributions? Quality? Quantity? This would be similar to your problem with code contributions, if not much more difficult. Do we need a Karma Officer who evaluates each contribution?

After all, you intend to measure „contribution to the TYPO3 project and community“, which doesn’t end with the official teams and committees. Some people have committed themselves, their expertise and (in some cases personal) time for more than 10 years without writing a single core commit.

Depending on the destination, at some point, you could exclude a part of the TYPO3 community for contributing „the wrong way“.

Thank you. That’s some good steps to get the data. :+1:

It is not limited to code contributions. Every kind of contribution should count. This is important in order to make the community welcoming to everyone, also non-coders.

Yes to all except sponsoring. Sponsorship is another great way to contribute, but I think it’s important that you can’t pay your way to karma.

We want to avoid misuse, that’s for sure, but I like to speak about fairness rather than quality. Quality is also subjective. A first-time contributor may have a lot to learn, but needs encouragement.

I don’t think we’ll need a Karma Officer, but we have to make adjustments and learn from our experience.

For example, a team leader will be able to add karma to everyone who attended a sprint. The karma earned from a sprint is predefined and can’t be changed by the team leader. That means the first-timer who spent the entire sprint learning the ropes will get the same amount of karma as the experienced participant who got a lot done. That’s not karma for “same quality delivered”, but it’s fair because it’s “equal effort”.

(Of course, you can rate effort, but I think that would be overly complicated to handle.)

If every contribution counts, there shouldn’t be a “wrong way” to contribute. It may take time to get every area covered. Core contribution is only one part of a much larger picture.

Hi all,

although I really like Karma in general, contributing is more than to measure code (and even more than just measuring core code). It’s about participating in events, writing blog articles, helping out others on StackOverflow. This is Karma for me. So it’d be good to work with TYPO3 Karma as like we do in slack, where people give claps/shoutouts to others for their support etc. “Kudos” buttons ;).

I’m more for personal “karma” than automatic generated statistics karma out of GitHub or whatev.

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For a programmer who writes code, an important indicator is: How others are pleased with his work. Therefore it is important to consider:

  • quality of work (minimum corrections dependent on the programmer);
  • the number of downloads and failures for the developed extensions;
  • Improving the performance of the entire program (loading pages, time to access the database, etc.);
  • Developer’s response time to identified bugs and bug fixes.

Hi Benni!

If we find a fair way to give personal “manual” karma, I’m all in. :+1: Maybe it is possible? I’m just afraid that it won’t be fair because it tends to weigh long-term contributors higher than beginners. Karma is supposed to encourage more contribution, after all.

Let’s say a TYPO3 beginner creates a pull request for the first time. The code is ugly and breaks half the rules, and won’t be merged as is—but it’s still a contribution. Can we be sure it will receive the (disproportionately high) amount of claps and shoutouts to reflect the effort and encourage the new contributor to continue contributing?

Do you think it could work if we tried?

Hi Yurii!

Thank you for contributing to the discussion. Response time and performance are factors I hadn’t thought about.

The number of downloads is a good measure of interest, though maybe too easy to fake? Do you think we could find a way to make it a reliable gauge?

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Indeed, they are. And they’re difficult to fake too. :+1:

Hi Mathias

Do you think we could find a way to make it a reliable gauge?

I think yes. As an option, it would not be bad if statistics were used on extensions in working projects with LIVE status. That is, downloaded and used in real projects. You can give Karma to anyone who gives statistics about the projects implemented and the extensions used in them. And also give karma to those whose extensions are used.

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I think Karma should be treated as motivation. That she fascinated and motivated to participate. Therefore, perhaps such ideas still:

  1. Karma for additions to extensions: a) a database that is relevant and interesting to users; b) layouts and designs; c) sliders and more.
  2. Performing tasks from the community list. That is especially to reward those who make the necessary extensions for the community. You need to have such a list, since different developers can execute, but to admit the best extension.
  3. Development of technical specifications. Good technical assignment is always a valuable source of information.
  4. Initiative improvements. Improvements in other people’s extensions - optimization, quality improvement.
  5. Bonuses for market activity. For example, because the site is transferred from WordPress to TYPO3.
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I miss the mentioning of supporting TYPO3 by organizing (or helping to organize) any events. from usergroup to TYPO3camp. Not the sponsoring but contributing your own time and work.

And also as speaker on any event. so the milage may vary as speaker about a general subject on a TYPO3 event or about TYPO3 on a foreign event.


And aside of automatic counting we also should enable to give individual thanks / kudos which compute to karma points. e.g. if anyone wants to thank someone for individual (unpaid!) help not visible to everyone.

Also push the focus to the possibilities to give individual thanks / kudos to someone in different ways like ‘beers’ in slack, ‘reputations’ on SO, …

And we probably need to prevent abusage.
(SO has some interesting mechanism to avoid or at least restrict reputation abuse)

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One important part of the TYPO3 universe is not just “inspiring people to share” but also “helping others”. I see people doing this a lot - giving excellent support, answering questions, just helping others. At the sprints or initiative weeks - some people spent a lot of time just teaching others the ropes or helping someone else with their project.

There may be the danger that if only visible results are measured, doing actual altruistic helpful things won’t get you any karma. That would be a shame. And actually the opposite of what I consider karma-worthy.

So, I think the idea is interesting but there are lots of ways this can go wrong and actually get you the effects you don’t want in the long run.

Good point. Hopefully, there are many right ways to do it too.

I hope visualizing contribution can also bring more obscure or otherwise unseen or unacknowledged forms of contribution into the light.

With the community’s help we can discover more of the ways people contribute, and show our appreciation to them.