[openstack-dev] Gamification and on-boarding ...

Russell Bryant rbryant at redhat.com
Thu Feb 13 06:09:49 UTC 2014


On 02/12/2014 11:35 AM, Ben Nemec wrote:
> On 2014-02-12 12:00, Sandy Walsh wrote:
>> 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/
> 
> +1 from me, if this can be done without a huge amount of ongoing
> maintenance for someone.  I will admit that climbing the reviewstats
> "leaderboard" is good motivation for those days when I just don't feel
> like reviewing.  Ditto for Launchpad karma. :-)

I really like the badges idea.  It sounds like a really fun way to
encourage folks.  It's a refreshing alternative to just looking at raw
numbers all the time.

-- 
Russell Bryant



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