ROS Answers needs your help

[gavanderhoorn]

@lmathieu

sponsored ROSCon: that is a nice idea. That could certainly be a nice way to recognise community contributions without resorting to just handing out money

Just giving my though on this, It’s a good idea but it will maybe launch a “Karma War” from some people to answers all the questions, with a risk of bad answers, just to get Karma (If the OP of the questions mark as answered, It gives Karma nonetheless.

This is something we would need to be careful with, I agree. However, we do still have other users and the moderation system. Answers (and questions) can also be downvoted. The idea of this being of course that it’s a self-balancing system (in the end).

@Martin_Guenther

I’ve been slacking off in answering questions myself, and I’ll try to spend the 15 minutes each day from now on.

My OP was more a call-to-action, as in “we can do better”, but if you feel you’ve been “slacking off” then that sounds like a good motivator

@Martin_Guenther

I believe it’s best to encourage people to answer questions out of intrinsic motivations instead of paying them to do so (because it will lead to sub-standard answers).

As I wrote in reply to @lmathieu’s comment, I believe this can be mitigated by the self-correcting nature of the system with up- and down-votes.

I do agree completely that intrinsic motivation is best. For some people money is a good intrinsic motivator though But perhaps altruism might be a good one too.

@Martin_Guenther

When all the easy questions were already gone, I started researching answers to questions that I didn’t immediately know the answer to. After a while, I noticed that this really helped me to gain broad understanding of everything there is in ROS, even though that wasn’t my original intent when answering those questions (I wanted to get karma!). I believe this is really the best way to become a ROS expert.

I completely agree with this one too. It’s basically what I wrote at the end of my (perhaps too long) OP.