Open Stack

Sandy Walsh wrote:
> 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. 

I think that works if you only keep the ones you can automate.
"Constructive in IRC" for example sounds a bit subjective to me, and you
don't want to issue those badges one-by-one manually.

Second thing, you don't want the game to start polluting your bug
status, i.e. people randomly setting bugs to "triaged" to earn the
"Triaged a bug" badge. So the badges we keep should be provably useful ;)

A few other suggestions:
"Found a valid security issue" (to encourage security reports)
"Fixed a bug submitted by someone else" (to encourage attacking random bugs)
"Removed code" (to encourage tech debt reduction)
"Backported a fix to a stable branch" (to encourage backporting)
"Fixed a bug that was tagged nobody-wants-to-fix-this-one" (to encourage
people to attack critical / hard bugs)

We might need "protected" tags to automate this: tags that only some
people could set to bugs/tasks to designate "gate-freeing" or
"nobody-wants-to-fix-this-one" bugs that will give you badges if you fix
them.

So overall it's a good idea, but it sounds a bit tricky to automate it
properly to avoid bad side-effects.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)