Encouraging participation with gamification

[Juanjo Marín <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

Hi !

Since we switched the name from the marketing team to the engagement team my thoughts about what have to do has changed a bit. As consequence, I'm more concerned about promoting the participation into the GNOME project. Of course, we still must help to communicate what GNOME is, what we are doing, but it is true that we can also have to to encourage participation of new and old contributors.

One of the things we could do in this area is using a gamification badge-system in order to encourage the participation in the project. It is quite difficult to know the motivations behind of all our contributors, aside to help to this awesome project, but I think a badge system can add some value to the contributions and encourage some people to do more. A badge can be considered as a reward for certain amount of work that deserves some kind of recognition. A good thing about badges is that this recoignition can be used outside the project, for example when looking for a job.

Though the concept is pretty simple, the design of the badge system has to be done carefully. The goal is to  encourage people to start contributing and also to convey contributors into the process of learning and mastery by contributing more.

This system has associated several problems. For example, people will attempt to exploit any system in which there is something they deem of value, that can result in weird behaviour. For example, if we give a badge for a certain number of bugs opened in bugzilla, the number of duplicated bugs can raised.

At the end, what we need is a system that rewards the work done in the project. But I think that with an appropiated interface can also us help to give some information about what people are doing (communicate GNOME). I am very fan of the work of Vinicius Depizzol did for the GNOME Community web page.  

http://softwarelivre.org/rss/planetas/gnome-brasil/vinicius-depizzol-gsoc-weekly-update-8

Hey folks, what do you think ? Is it a good idea to have anything like this for GNOME ?  Maybe something different like a karma system point ? Can we do that ?  Can we do a plan ?

Just my two cents about this topic, mostly brain storming :-)

Cheers,

   -- Juanjo Marin

PS: Other Free Software projects has some implementations of this

Mozilla (they seem to have the FLOSS badge standard)
http://openbadges.org

Fedora
https://badges.fedoraproject.org/about

Ubuntu
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments