+1 Mentoring and devoted mentors and not demotivating new folks (but instead "growing" and fostering them) is IMHO 10x more important than a badge program. Badges seem nice and all but I think it's not the "biggest win for the buck".
Sent from my really tiny device... > On Feb 13, 2014, at 6:06 AM, "Sean Dague" <s...@dague.net> wrote: > >> On 02/13/2014 05:37 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote: >> 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. > > Gamification is a cool idea, if someone were to implement it, I'd be +1. > > Realistically, the biggest issue I see with on-boarding is mentoring > time. Especially with folks completely new to our structure, there is a > lot of confusing things going on. And OpenStack is a ton to absorb. I > get pinged a lot on IRC, answer when I can, and sometimes just have to > ignore things because there are only so many hours in the day. > > I think Anita has been doing a great job with the Neutron CI onboarding > and new folks, and that's given me perspective on just how many > dedicated mentors we'd need to bring new folks on. With 400 new people > showing up each release, it's a lot of engagement time. It's also > investment in our future, as some of these folks will become solid > contributors and core reviewers. > > So it seems like the only way we'd make real progress here is to get a > chunk of people to devote some dedicated time to mentoring in the next > cycle. Gamification might be most useful, but honestly I expect a "Start > Here" page with the consolidated list of low-hanging-fruit bugs, and a > Review Here page with all reviews for low hanging fruit bugs (so they > don't get lost by core review team) would be a great start. > > The delays on reviews for relatively trivial fixes I think is something > that is probably more demotivating to new folks than the lack of badges. > So some ability to keep on top of that I think would be really great. > > -Sean > > -- > Sean Dague > Samsung Research America > s...@dague.net / sean.da...@samsung.com > http://dague.net > > _______________________________________________ > OpenStack-dev mailing list > OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev