On Thu, Sep 02, 2021 at 09:12:51PM +0100, Leigh Griffin wrote:
I'm generally all for Automation but that creates a glue layer
that becomes
a thing that unless developed and actively maintained and can put us right
back at a conversation point when tech stacks move forward :)
[...]
Are there any insights or quantifiable data about the impact Badges
have?
Is it a subset of Badges that are more impactful? What I'm trying to get at
here is are all Badges equal or are a subset more valuable and hence
something to maybe bring to the design level conversations?
I think you've got two separate questions here, and are not so secretly
hoping that the answer to one of them will lead to there being less work for
the other. I'm for less work too, so I sympathize. :)
But, I think they really are separate issues. We definitely want to revisit
our overall strategies as part of this. In fact, one of the thing the
badgeos folks specialize in is developing comprehensive gamification
strategies, and we very well might want to take advantage of that as a
consulting engagement. I think there are roughly three goals:
1. To help onboard new people — or folks who have been around into a new
team. Badge paths show what you can do next to get more involved, or
perhaps need to do next to get membership in a certain group.
From the message bus activity I've been watching
(
https://mattdm.org/fedora/fedora-contributor-trends/, but soon to be
replaced with Josseline's new better system), we've consistently had
about 225 regular contributors to the project every week (and, each week,
about 100 other contributors who do some small thing but aren't engaged
other weeks). I'd like to double that, and to do that, we need better
onboarding paths.
2. To reward people for things they've done.
Badges are both little rewards in themselves (the gamification aspect,
which we've seen to be quite enjoyable and inspiring to some Fedora
folks), and we can also use badge pathways to send swag packages to folks
who have reached a certain level of activity (or done specific things).
3. To showcase the activity of the project overall.
Part of the original design was meant to be tied into Fedora Hubs, but
that never came to fruition. We'll need to figure out another way to
make a showcase, but overall badges make a nice way of showing off all of
the constant activity within the project.
The other issue, of glue... well, I have the pretty strong belief that
having systems which talk to each other is what makes a lot of this
possible. We can give badges for chairing a project meeting in Matrix/IRC
because that connection exists. We can have badges based on Discussion sign
up, or for helping people on Ask. We can give badges for submitting a change
to docs as a PR, and other badges for accepting that PR. A lot of projects
just have code commits and bugs from which to populate their picture of the
world, and since we have all of this interconnectedness, we can better lead
people to, reward people for, and showcase people's achievements in all
these non-coding areas — as well as, of course, dist-git, koji, bodhi, copr,
and so on.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader