Tell people where they are on the karma scale

This is a good idea. *grins*

I disagree. There are plenty of ways to contribute to Ubuntu that do not affect karma. People who participate in those activities may have poor karma, but might also have contributed greatly to the distribution and to the community in non-karma-accountable ways. These people would be disadvantaged by any system that promotes karma as an authoritative measure of one's contribution to Ubuntu.

However, there are active efforts to tie these types of contributions that do not currently affect karma into launchpad so that they DO affect Karma. Furthermore, Karma will NEVER be an authoritative measure - only an indication.

There is no way for an automated system to judge the quality of contributions, only quantity.

Will Launchpad keep track of the time I spend debugging code? Will it tally a score for my artwork or proselytism at events? I don't think it can.

Karma is currently Lanchpad karma. It is not supposed to track Ubuntu contributions, but Open Source contributions in general (at least what it is possible for us to track). It sort of works this way at the moment purely because Ubuntu is the main user of Launchpad and we are not giving Karma from external sources such as mailing lists or forums yet. However, you can also get Karma from upstream product work (bugs, translations - etc.) or from other distributions that also use Launchpad (eg. Baltix). It is quite possible for someone to have a high Karma score who hates Ubuntu with a passion and evangelizes this at every opportunity.

Karma scores are quite volatile (https://help.launchpad.net/KarmaCalculation), and we need to fix this somehow. An option would be to simply display the users position on the ladder rather than an actual score. Do you think this would be ok, or would we need both a score and a ladder position?

I like the idea of a scale.

Karma value is arbitrary. We think it would be better to stop giving numbers and instead show counts for activities for week/month/year so that it is clear when someone makes contribution without assumptions that the contribution was valuable.