On Monday 09 December 2013 13:50:38 Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 08.12.2013 21:23, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Friday 06 December 2013 22:33:03 Adam Spiers wrote:
Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org) wrote: <snip>
You have to be very careful with that, you can easily destroy communities with it.
Agreed.
Henne, that was a fantastically useful and well-thought out post
I concur, this was an insightful post.
Thanks, it just happens to be that gamification is one of my pipe-dreams for the OBS so I researched it a bit. There are other great summaries about this topic like Aza Raskin's: "Behavior Change Checklist" [1] or all of the works from Sebastian Deterding [2].
What I was hoping to achieve with this discussion is to get some kind of agreement that, despite the possible downsides, there are aspects of karma-ish things we could use for good. I personally really do believe that. Well we all can agree or disagree on possibilities, it doesn't really matter.
I think we all agree that making contributions more visible is a good idea with few, if any, downsides. I would suggest to start there. Show on OBS projects how many users it has, show on user pages what he/she does in openSUSE: plain and simple 'making things more visible'.
This proposal sounds much more like the "collect, display and see what happens" approach. And while it might be proposed with good intentions this approach is the usual way gamification goes awfully wrong, discourages people and produces other unwanted results.
You really have to think hard about what you want to encourage, how you will encourage it and what the compulsion loop looks like. How about we start with collecting and discussing ideas about that? Like this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArMbkBL7n3y4dFpoekNKMldzeE5Wc3 pGaHlJOXBORkE#gid=0
I went over the list. Now I'm not a huge fan of the points system, to be honest. As (I think) you wrote, it is important that what you 'get' fits with what you do. Points are very abstract, while there are far more concrete things you can do. I would start with just showing what people do. That doesn't have to be a 'just collect, display and see what happens', any more than that rewarding points has to be 'just give out, display and see what happens'. We can think about what we want to encourage and how just as much. So instead of awarding arbitrary 'points' for fixing bugs, I would rather show on somebody's profile how many bugs he/she has closed marked 'fixed' with a SR for example. And let's have a weekly top-ten of bugfixers on build.opensuse.org! Also, as we want people to also help keep factory stable, fixing factory bugs counts double. And we want people to help keep factory stable - ESPECIALLY when they don't maintain packages. So fixing a bug in a package you don't maintain counts double, in factory - that's times four. To reward ambassadors for giving talks at events, I'd rather allow them to upload a picture of themselves giving a talk to their profile page for each talk they gave; and have an overview of the events they attended as ambassador. When they went to 6 events over 3 years and gave 4 talks, they become 'elite' ambassador. I know it easily becomes childish/tacky so we have to do this in a careful, respectful way. But I think it can work. And yes, if you dominate the top-ten bug fixers for half a year, we can send you a nice t-shirt that says something like "I scare bugs" ;-) Now, points vs 'number of bugs fixed' - both are numbers, esp if we double them in certain conditions, so we are probably talking about the same thing here... ;-) I just missed the "where do you show it" in the spread sheet. /J
Henne
[1] http://schedule.sxsw.com/2011/events/event_IAP000453 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY