Antoine Thomas

Audacity does not manage well the latency. That's why you would prefer to use Ardour. If jack sees your devices, you should be able to use them with Ardour tracks. You just have to select a track, and map an input. Easy.

Joel Spolsky, told in a talk I attended that people don't participate more with gamification. It helps to identify and highlight leaders, to give weight to someone action on a community. Only a few people will actually "play the game".

I did some gamification trials in my previous job. And I tend to agree with him.

Leaders gives a lot of value to a community, a Q&A, a forum, or whatever. However, you can be sure that they would participate at the same level without gamification. Once you are able to identify the leaders of your community, the rewards should be something else than just points and badges, or moderation rights.

You can then interview your community leaders on you blog, invite them to events, integrate their feedback in your roadmap. You can, in some case, think about hiring them to continue what they do, full time, for the benefit of your project/product community.

At the Eclipse Foundation, we are working on a new user profile for our Community. Not sure that we will introduce points and badges. However, we already have many statistics: commits, messages on the forum, articles on our planet blog, issues on the bug tracker, ..... You can not cheat with this kind of information, and just displaying it is a good starting point. It helps to understand if you are exchanging with a long time expert, or a beginner in the Community.

The last point, in open source, is how you can highlight and reward non coders people. A lot of open source software users (like me) are not technical people, but advanced users. They participate to the forums, improve documentation, help beginners, open bugs. Meritocracy is often concentrated around the code contribution, I really think that this should evolve and be more user centric.