An OKarma/Open Karma idea
I wonder if anyone is willing to somehow tackle the idea I’d like to introduce in this post. Or maybe just tell me it’s all crap, doesn’t make any sense and maybe even sounds fine but will sure get hairy when one gets into details.
So the deal is, among other sites, I happen to have a user account over at Launchpad and Ohloh too. Fair enough. Now the thing is, there’s this karma concept associated with having an account. Basically, the more work you do at the site – be it resolving bugs, dealing with user questions, committing to repos, etc. – the more karma points you receive. The points can’t be traded for anything, no 
I guess it’s just a more or less interesting way to reaffirm one’s importance in this cold world full of people making quick judgements based on brief and cursory acquaintances, if you’re into that sort of things.
Anyway, about the karma. The nicer citizen of the open source world you are, the more karma you have, quite simple. But the trouble is, when you go to a new site, you need to build it all up from the very bottom, you have no karma in that new place. You’re the same person but the site doesn’t know you so it doesn’t give a fig about your having collected oh-so-many points on other sites – which is of course just another trivial example of the mismatch that underlies the difference between proving that you are yourself and that the computer you used at a certain time was really operated by you. Now, I couldn’t care less about it all – and still I’m not sure what to think about the idea for that matter – but the issue that I’m really thinking about is that the new sites sometimes require your proving that you’re a sane person, usually in the sense of not being a spammer. For instance, there are some forums that require that you post at least one message without links before you can post something that contains links – which is a simple and probably efficient spam protection. So what I had to do the other day at one forum was to post a silly message in a thread that I wasn’t really prepared to take part in before I could post a release announcement of one of the projects I participate in. I’m sure you can see where I’m coming from, had the forum known that I wasn’t that much of a jerk they wouldn’t've asked me for anything, they would’ve just somehow fetched my karma information, would’ve nodded to it and would’ve let me post the message just like that. And I think it could work in a general case. Why should you require me to prove I’m not a moron if your good friends over at the other great open source hub have already come to the conclusion that I’m an OK person?
I’m not really that convinced it should be done but I can see at least that one point about posting links that could be made easier with the concept we’re talking here. It’s likely that it could be useful whenever there’s any sort of reward dependent on the user’s reputation involved, that scenarios are likely candidates. And I certainly don’t want to even think how to properly implement it, I haven’t even written a single karma-providing system like the ones mentioned previously so I have no clue what kind of a common data model we’re talking about and how useful a generalization of what particular sites use could be. Just throwing out some idea, nothing more.
