Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
The current system requires a legend to keep track of the relative values of badges. That's a bit more than straight counting.
The current system uses labels that have contextual meaning in the wider society that imply an increasing social value. Those who are 'newbie' are less than 'rock star', and a 'guru' etc. implies even more - those who are enlightened versus those who are just famous for skill or stuck as stupid new people.
My emotional thinking is that these types of labels are somewhere on a spectrum that includes top-ten lists because of the way they single some people out with Special Meaning over many, many other people ... especially where the metrics behind the Special Meaning are not as meaningful as the label. (A Newbie may have five brilliant comments to a Rock Star's five hundred dull comments; anyone who knows the difference can see the Newbie being slighted.)
We focus a lot on the positive feelings people get from achieving badge levels, but we all suffer from the silencing and loss of participation when people feel left out. I don't see how we gain from using these type of labels for badges, nor how we gain from using more of them.
There are labels used here that make great sense from a collaborative viewpoint. It's helpful to know who has administrative or authoring privileges on the system. That's a badge that shows achievement but is courteous to others and their feelings of inclusion/exclusion. It also shows a <a href="http://bit.ly/TOSWOpentheClique">clear way for outsiders to engage and join the insiders</a>.
Some labels I am split about, such as the type of badge that indicates an exclusive club I may never be able to achieve, such as founding member. I think I'd leave that information to a biography page where it serves as a courtesy to others learning about and working with the community, and isn't a big gold medallion you wear around your neck all the time.
Back to my suggestion to consider bundled fruit units as inspiration, I notice that games use similar as a tracking and incentive strategy. In a game, I care less if I am a rogue, cutthroat, or master thief, and care more how much gold and experience points I've accumulated.
Personally, I've never ran away from a simple track-of-my-participation-metrics system, but I have left online, open source communities that focused on who got guru rank and what prizes they now have a chance at. It all felt anti-social and just made me uncomfortable, so I stopped hanging around.
The challenge with these labels is related to the "top 10" lists of people problem - they serve to demotivate more than they motivate. More argument on that in my blog post "<a href="http://iquaid.org/2009/11/11/calling-out-superrockstars-considered-harmful/">Calling out superrockstars considered harmful</a>", which I won't rehash in these comments.
For badges, what I've found helpful is when the badge actually signifies something of meaning, an actual metric. For example, I use an app on my Android phone that let's me track workouts, and it provides a badge of my calories-burned-this-week in the status bar. I find that badge and number highly motivating - it's real feedback with real meaning, and provides me incentive to move that number every time I can.
When I see labels such as "rock star", they not only have no meaning, they are rather obtuse. Is "rock star" better or worse than "newbie"? (Depends on the context!) I need to have a fairly good understanding of English-language idioms to make that call. For the other suggestions in these comments, how do you instantly <emphasis>know</emphasis> that those are a higher value in this system than "rock star"?
I suggest we head in a new direction. Try to find what we are actually tracking, which I believe is (roughly), "How much do you participate in this forum + what do others think about what you have to say." Then let's think of ways to show those levels.
Accumulated points come to mind. Having the point levels have different colors is a nice way to quickly see when you rise or drop.
Collections of fruit or stuffed animals that clearly build up? For example, one apple, three apples, five apples, a bushel of apples, two bushels, three bushels, a truckload of apples, two truckloads, etc. With such a system you can quickly see that someone who has a truckload of apples has gone through a lot of levels to get there, yet there isn't any socially inherent value of "number of apples you have obtained" compared to "you are a rock star, but she is a superrock star, you lose."
What are some other ways to show this accumulated social worth in a style that motivates everyone?