Recognizing contributions

[corywatilo]

Since we're going to build out community profiles, it will be fun to gamify it a bit to eventually incentivize contributions. There are different monetary ways we can do this (ie: free merch, free event allotment), but for now, let's discuss the types of contributions and how we can represent them on a contributor's community profile.

Types of contributions

This could include:

1. Contributing code*
2. Filing issues*
3. Improving docs articles - might need to pull contributions from the website repo
4. Answering community questions - integration with Squeak!
5. Time spent on website/in-app - data from identified users within PostHog?

*These are already handled through the All Contributors library (more info).

Ultimately, this data should be stored within a user's Squeak! profile so we don't have to only rely on data coming from GitHub.

Types of badges

The badges from All Contributors is a good start, but we could do more. And all of ours should feature custom artwork.

In the final mockup in the Community v0.1 issue, I proposed a general concept for laying out badges (seen below). (All the badges, aside from the Core team badge are ultimately sourced from the All Contributors plugin.

Open question: What are some other badges we could have, and what could they look like?

Inspiration

GitHub

GitHub has some cool badges, and you can read more detail about them by clicking on them. They also have nice animations when you look at their details.

Foursquare

A bit of a throwback, but Foursquare/Swarm had some great ones, and they were very compelling. =]

[corywatilo]

Ideas

• Respond to 5 questions (where your answer is marked as the solution) and get $20 to our merch store
• Additional free events in a paid account

[corywatilo]

Evolution of this is in #5952

[andyvan-ph]

• I like the "Mark as solution idea", but maybe we could expand this by making it possible for people to "give thanks" / upvote responses. We could then reward people after a certain number of upvotes, or have a live leaderboard where the top 5 members each month get a merch code / some other other reward.

• Expanding on the above, I think it would be good to have levels based on number of comments / votes. Each level would have a number, name, and an accompanying hedgehog mascot. Levels would be display next to the user's name in question threads.

• As part of this, I think we could / should bestow high level status to already active members of the Slack community – i.e. find the most active people on Slack / GitHub and automatically give them a high level on their website community account.

TL;DR: I'd favour upvotes + levels over action specific achievements.

[corywatilo]

Some more ideas for badges we've had recently:

• Creating their first question - curious George hedgehog
• Getting answer marked as solution
• Upvoting a roadmap item
• Time in community
• Bookwork
• Time in docs (pageviews, etc)
• Spam zapper (report a spam post)
• Upvoting post
• Shared docs feedback
• Github activity?
• Follows PostHog/CEO
• Late night hacker (working past 2am in their local time)
• Product-related (for later)
• Teams add-on badge
• Enterprise plan member
• Building our defining feature
• Infinite points. Impossible to redeem.
• Docs contributions
• Fill out bio

And some potential awards:

• Signed photo of James and Tim
• Limited edition stickers
• General merch points
• Invite to offsite
• Lunch with local team member(s)
• All hands shout out
• Bespoke tattoo design
• Community hall of fame - custom art version of your face
  • Featured on Community News