Open Stack

At the Nova mid-cycle meetup we've been talking about the problem of helping new contributors. It got into a discussion of karma, code reviews, bug fixes and establishing a name for yourself before screaming in a chat room "can someone look at my branch". We want this experience to be positive, but not everyone has time to hand-hold new people in the dance.

The informal OpenStack motto is "automate everything", so perhaps we should consider some form of gamification [1] to help us? Can we offer badges, quests and challenges to new users to lead them on the way to being strong contributors?

"Fixed your first bug" badge
"Updated the docs" badge
"Got your blueprint approved" badge
"Triaged a bug" badge
"Reviewed a branch" badge
"Contributed to 3 OpenStack projects" badge
"Fixed a Cells bug" badge
"Constructive in IRC" badge
"Freed the gate" badge
"Reverted branch from a core" badge
etc. 

These can be strung together as Quests to lead people along the path. It's more than karma and less sterile than stackalytics. The Foundation could even promote the rising stars and highlight the leader board. 

There are gamification-as-a-service offerings out there [2] as well as Fedora Badges [3] (python and open source) that we may want to consider. 

Thoughts?
-Sandy

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
[2] http://gamify.com/ (and many others)
[3] https://badges.fedoraproject.org/