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Karma is Launchpad's way of showing how active a person is in Launchpad.
Almost everything you do in Launchpad helps you to build karma. For example: registering bugs, translating strings and answering support requests. Your karma is a reflection of the type of work you've done and when you did it.
Karma is only attributed for work done in Launchpad and does not apply to items imported from other sources.
How Launchpad calculates your karma
Different sorts of work are often valued differently by the projects you work with. When you work in Launchpad, it makes a note of actions that might be valuable to the relevant community.
Then, once a day, Launchpad looks at all of the work you've done and gives each action a score. The score it gives depends on:
- what sort of work you did
- when you did the work.
For example: if you answer a support request today, Launchpad will give you the full score. If you answered a support request six months ago, Launchpad would award you half the score. After twelve months an action no longer counts towards your karma.
Your karma is the total of the score Launchpad awards you in each category of work.
Why is karma time sensitive?
Launchpad reduces the karma it gives to older actions for two reasons:
- to reflect each individual's current work
- and to give newer users the opportunity to catch up with longer-term users.
How Launchpad calculates the score for each type of work
Overall, Launchpad ensures that the total score in each application is the same. For example: if the total karma for work in the Bug Tracker were 500, but the total for the Answer Tracker were 1,000, Launchpad would tune each category's score so that they were equal.
To do this normalisation, Launchpad adds up the total amount of karma it has given to people in each category. It then works out a scaling factor for each category and multiplies everyone's karma in each category by this scaling factor. As these scaling factors are recalculated daily, it introduces some 'wobble' into karma scores, although this evens out in the longer term.
Viewing your karma
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Your total karma |
You can see your own karma in the summary section of your Launchpad profile page.
You can also view a breakdown of where you earned your karma, along with a log of recent activities that will count towards your score.
Next steps
Most people create a Launchpad account because they want to work with other people on free software.
Launchpad helps you to join and build communities around free software efforts through teams.
