Contributor roles & badges (follow-up)

[Hooray]

What kind of "badges" would people like to see ?

For example:

• core committer
• TerraGear committer
• fgdata committer
• aircraft developer
• manual maintainer
• RC tester
• Support staff
• wiki maintainer
• forum moderator
  etc ?

Background:
Subject: Forum communication

But it took me a while on the forum to know who i can trust almost blindly for their good knowledge. It would have saved me and the people that tried to help me some time if i had seen immediately that someone is a "top developer" or "serious helper" or something of the like.

But it took me a while on the forum to know who i can trust almost blindly for their good knowledge. It would have saved me and the people that tried to help me some time if i had seen immediately that someone is a "top developer" or "serious helper" or something of the like.

Subject: Towards better bug reports & better releases

I think we did have once a discussion about "badges", and Gijs said that it would not be too difficult - so if that would motivate /some/ people to get involved in testing/providing end-user support, why not (I guess)

Is this something that people (=forum users/fgdata contributors) would like to see implemented ?

We did have these discussions in the past (open the links for more context info):
Subject: Awards system proposal

I think Gijs also once brough up something like this - back then we were talking about having "forum badges" to more easily associate people with certain projects/efforts or tasks (aircraft developer, scenery developer, scripting, core development etc). Basically, something like this could work - and it could actually be based on ohloh stats. I am not sure if it's really an "award" in the sense of an "incentive" though - but it could be useful to help new users to more easily identify who to talk to about certain things, because FG development is mostly obscure, and it isn't really clear who you're talking to most of the time and who can help you with certain things (weather, scripting, glsl, FDMs etc)

Subject: Awards system proposal

some good points there - then again, the people doing much of the "invisible" behind-the-scenes work like James or Stuart are very unlikely to care in the first place - they're obviously not motivated by "badges", "awards" or things like that (or lack thereof)- I think "awards" would be primarily of interest to base package developers, not core developers - so this could actually work to motivate some of the younger contributors.

And frankly, it seems most of our manpower is coming from users who are under 20 according to their postings (which makes sense) - so it isn't all that unlikely that this could help motivate a few more people and get them involved.

Then again, involvement beats awards obviously - so I completely agree here. It's involvement that keeps the project alive, no matter in what form it may be, it starts off by participating in the forum/devel list/tracker/wiki, but it surely isn't restricted to those.

People doing "coding" (C++, GLSL, Nasal etc) are unlikely to care in the first place, so they surely won't be bothered by it - even though it would admittedly be hilarious seeing Mathias and Tim fight over a "gold" badge And I think it's "normal" for developers not to use FG for "flying" primarily - but that's also not necessarily what motivates coders

[Johan G]

...it took me a while on the forum to know who i can trust almost blindly for their good knowledge.

Is the key word "trust" or is there more to it? I have quite noticed that number of posts often is an indicator, but not always.

Also who how should set the badges and how? The user himself, by moderators, by invitation?

I guess that if it is about trust, it would be in a way related to the way people become committers. In essence more or less that they are more or less invited to commit contributions themselves instead of through a committer, as they did when they started to contribute.

Also, what about when someone have many roles, say like being a FGAddon committer, forum admin and maintainer, and wiki admin and maintainer? (Not me, someone else. )

[KL-666]

Hey, i find myself discussing without even being there

The original problem was, that many people told me complex time consuming things to try that lead nowhere. After knowing a bit more myself, i saw that these advises could never have led anywhere. So if you know nothing you can not know which advises you should spend your time on. Then another indicator would be welcome.

Kind regards, Vincent

[Hooray]

Personally, I would not be motivated by this - but apparently, a number of end-users would find this useful, and regarding your last question, there's only a handful of people to whom that would apply - and they are most unlikely to care ... anyway, ou could have a list of badges:

[x] core committer
[x] fgdata committer
[x] wiki admin
[x] manual maintainer
[x] release manager

which would be even sufficient to describe all the roles that people like Torsten, James or Stuart are holding.
In terms of badgets, something like this could be a visualized using greyed-out items that don't apply - Michat once posted suggestions related to this.
Regarding the other question, Gijs once mentioned that phpBB can show "ranks" next to forum accounts, so it is straightforward to set up something like this, if people should find this is needed to motivate folks to get involved in the community - but personally, I don't consider this relevant for core developers/core development in general. We could probably restrict this to fgdata, because the group of core developers is sufficiently small, so that people are known anyway - and the whole fgdata focus would nicely match the kind of manpower that you can typically find on the forum

[legoboyvdlp]

core committer - certainly
TerraGear committer - yes, to know who to contact for help
fgdata committer - yep - especially Gilbertoasgostinho
aircraft developer - Sure!
manual maintainer - Why not?
RC tester - ditto
Support staff - most users here on the forum provide support.... not so sure.
wiki maintainer - well, Hooray and Johan, and others deserve this
forum moderator - certainly

There are my comments

[Hooray]

Personally, I don't care - but I can understand people saying that they find it hard to tell who they need to get in touch with under certain circumstances, or even just who they're dealing with - but personally, I am not too eager to receive even more PMs to explain to someone how to upload an image to the wiki or how to link to images in forum postings.

From my perspective, 1:1 interaction does not scale at all - i.e. we /need/ people to work through the corresponding help articles on the wiki - and ideally, we would have a team of people on the forum to review common issues/support threads and evaluate those to turn them into wiki articles, whereas another handful of people could review the wiki and do the same thing with popular articles that should end up in the manual.

Regarding "support staff": could have the requirement that those people triage/review bug reports and file them at the tracker if necessary, i.e. to interface between end-users on the forum, and people on the tracker

[Buckaroo]

Badges? We don't need no badges.

If someone really wants to be known for something, they can put it in their sig line. Easy peasy. No stinkin' badges required.

-Buck