{"id":539,"date":"2012-07-17T17:34:38","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T22:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/?p=539"},"modified":"2012-07-17T17:36:26","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T22:36:26","slug":"gamifying-community-whether-and-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2012\/07\/17\/gamifying-community-whether-and-how\/","title":{"rendered":"Gamifying community: Whether, and how?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is <a href=\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2012\/07\/16\/defining-community-health-at-scale\/\">another post <\/a>on a particularly interesting topic from the <a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/www.communityleadershipsummit.com\/\">Community Leadership Summit<\/a>: how to bring the increasingly popular trend of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gamification\">gamification<\/a> to online communities. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu&#8217;s community manager, gave a plenary talk on some work he&#8217;s done to apply it to Ubuntu.<\/p>\n<p>His idea is a simple one but surprisingly nontrivial to implement: In a low-friction, automated fashion, detect when people have completed a useful set of tasks that define a trophy or badge of some sort, varying from small to major. For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>File your first bug report<\/li>\n<li>Close 5 bug reports<\/li>\n<li>Join the <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/CommunityCouncil\">Community Council<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The part that makes doing so complex is integrating with a broad variety of infrastructure across the project. A centralized backend can detect all these activities happening, then pop up a transitory notification on the user&#8217;s system to let them know they&#8217;ve achieved some award.<\/p>\n<p>I think there&#8217;s some potential to this, since gamification is really something that&#8217;s happened in online communities for years.\u00a0Think of forum websites running phpBB, which has the concept that users can earn different ranks after they&#8217;ve made certain numbers of posts to the forums. It seems to me, though, that <strong>gamification may reach its limits with relatively simple contributions<\/strong> &#8212; it could be a better path to gaining new contributors than to converting existing ones to become more involved.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking along similar directions for a while in the context of open-source projects like Gentoo Linux, but on a vastly different level, because I feel that <strong>most OSS projects fail to properly recognize the contributions of their own developers<\/strong>. There&#8217;s a huge black hole where there should be publicly expressed gratitude, and we could fill some of it with titles for various levels of contribution.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine if we had a system of recognition where large open-source projects essentially had a technical promotion track. Key people who had made long-term, extensive contributions to the project could be declared Fellows, others could be Senior Principal Developers, and so forth. <strong>I think there&#8217;s an unfulfilled need for greater recognition within most open-source projects, and this might be a good way to do it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Disclosure: Canonical is a client. The Gentoo Foundation is not, although I am an active developer.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"acc_license\"><a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-sa\/3.0\/88x31.png\" alt=\"by-sa\" \/><\/a><\/div><!--<rdf:RDF xmlns=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#\" xmlns:dc=\"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/elements\/1.1\/\" xmlns:rdf=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/02\/22-rdf-syntax-ns#\"><Work rdf:about=\"\"><license rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\" \/><\/Work><License rdf:about=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/\"><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Attribution\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Reproduction\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Distribution\" \/><permits rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#DerivativeWorks\" \/><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#ShareAlike\" \/><requires rdf:resource=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/ns#Notice\" \/><\/License><\/rdf:RDF>-->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is another post on a particularly interesting topic from the Community Leadership Summit: how to bring the increasingly popular trend of gamification to online communities. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu&#8217;s community manager, gave a plenary talk on some work he&#8217;s done to apply it to Ubuntu. His idea is a simple one but surprisingly nontrivial to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-open-source","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p23Tsn-8H","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}