Karma System

Hello all, how are you?

A few months ago, someone here on the mailing list ask about a badge system
to gamefy experience of the communities members, last saturday i talked
with Cal Evans at PHP Experience (a PHP Conference at São Paulo) about a
Karma system that we at PHPSP are thinking about, so he asked me to send an
e-mail here explaining the idea.

But first let me tell a bit more about the motivations of the idea, a few
of you may already know that PHPSP is the São Paulo User Group, and here we
try to take decisions all together, something close to a democracy where
every active member have a voice on the community and can vote on
importante topics

The problem is that is a little difficult to define "active member", só we
thought about a karma system where the member can earn points of
participation in differente types of activities on the User Group, things
like:

   - Attende at an event
   - Talk at an event
   - Contribute on open source projects of the group
   - Create content for the UG blog
   - and so on....

So by doing any of those activities, the member will earn a predefined
number of points, and the total ammount of points the member has could lead
to some benefits such as:

   - Discounts in events
   - Badges
   - Vote right
   - Freebies like T-shirst and stickers
   - Admim privileges at social networks
   - and so on....

But the opposite is also true, the meber who spent a little while without
make any contributions to the communitie will also loose some points. This
way we think we can put in numbers what is in fact being an "active member".

So the point of all this is that we was willing to make this system by
ourselfs at PHPSP, but this could became much better if the communities all
over the world want to make a big one. So what do you think folks? Is it a
good idea? are you willing to make it happen?

Thanks a lot and sorry for the huge post.
Paulo Eduardo
www.pauloeduardo.com
www.psyco.com.br