What are the qualities you need more of in your open source community? Specific coding or QA skills, or maybe documentation? Mentoring, conflict resolution, and planing awesome events too? All of these are skills you can specifically encourage in your community by building badges that recognize people for development of specific skill sets and achievement of specific milestones. This is amazing, but also, there is much more to building a real culture of recognition for project contributors than badging. In this session we will discuss open badges, how to implement them as part of a contribution recognition program, how to do personal recognition that “sticks”, and how to “recognize the recognizers” to build appreciation and support within your community.

1. We don’t need no
stinking…

2. Badges
At the intersection of badging and recognition lie some
scalable solutions for supporting and growing your open
source project(s)
Larissa Shapiro
@larissashapiro

3. I’m…
…working on “contributor development” within
community building full time these days.
…a Mozillian
whose job is to grow contributors and help them
connect to meaningful work inside our project,
and, I’m really into building a culture where we
recognize each other and grow together. So!

4. Late afternoon wakeup!
Spectrogram time!
5 minutes.
5 questions:
1. I am having a great time at Open Source Bridge!
2. “I find t-shirts highly motivating”
3. I don’t like to be acknowledged in public
4. I like to earn badges and I think they help people see what I know how to do
5. My open source projects recognize our contributors effectively

5. Badges Are…
a defined set of skills and activities to be completed
a way to demonstrate publicly what one has learned
a way to organize and count contributions and
contributors
and, I hypothesize, *not* a primary recognition form

6. Recognition is…
how we let each other know that we see the good work
people are doing
how we learn more about each other
a culture to be built and nurtured…

7. How do you like to be recognized?
How does your project recognize?
5 minute brainstorm with
your neighbor

8. Learnings
shockingly, not everyone feels good about the same
things.
learning and documenting how people want to be
recognized, at scale, is hard
check in with people! document!
*be creative!*

9. Crafty Recognition

10. now with more fibonacci
sequenced knitting projects
We had a contest for someone to guess when we’d hit our millionth bugzilla bug, and when we did, one of our DBAs knitted this scarf for the winner. It’s
knitted in a fibonacci sequence

11. Badges and Recognition: a
Comparison/Review
Badges do recognize
specific skils
and activities
within a context
Recognition takes a persons
individual talents and skills
into account
Badges identify specific
rubric based
skillsets in a community
and can allow for counting,
community identification,
and more

12. Interesting Badge Idea
Live demo? discovery.openbadges.org

13. Resources
wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Recognition/Toolkit
badgekit.org
discovery.openbadges.org
blog.mozilla.org/community/category/crafting/
Mensch of the Month: blog.webfwd.org/tagged/mom

14. find me later,
talk about more stuff
Larissa Shapiro
lshapiro@mozilla.com
@larissashapiro
contentsmayvary.blogspot.com
(blog posts are a rare bird, but they do fly by)