Gamerification in the Community

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Ian Weisser <ian-weisser at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon Dec 8 22:30:07 UTC 2014, belkinsa wrote:
>
>
>> In the other thread (the one about the connection), the karma and
>> Open Badges was brought up.  These are forms of gamerification and,
>> if we improve on what we have, we can motivate more people to get
>> involved and contribute to the project and the OS.
>
> I think that the impact of gamerification is limited, and energy spent
> on it would be mostly wasted.
>
> I recall no examples where the technique helped a recruiting process.
>
> As a retention tool, the technique stales quickly. Elfy and Jorge (and
> everyone else) are welcome to correct me on this: A few people care
> about high scores for their own sake, but most of your great support
> gurus in the Forums and AskUbuntu quickly outgrow the scores after a few
> weeks. They stick around for a different reason.
>
> A few weeks, with improvements, may grow to a few months. But that's
> still not enough for our purposes. Our efforts to recruit and retain
> should pay off across multi-years. Only two methods achieve that:
> Interesting work and interesting people. Gamerification merely extends
> the available time for either long-term method to apply to the new
> volunteer.
>
> So go ahead an improve and coordinate and open the gamerification
> systems we have, and extend them to new sites. But don't expend too much
> energy on the changes (unless, of course, it scratches your itch to do
> so, and you make it maintainable). Because the benefit will be minor.

I agree. Some may recall that a significant amount of effort was put
into the Accomplishments system a few years back and that didn't
really go anywhere, even with Jono's support and promotion.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-accomplishments

Now, part of this could be that it was the wrong metrics and with the
right framework this could work. But I think the folks getting the
most out of it this particular project were the ones contributing to
the Accomplishments system itself, rather than from the resulting
gamification it created :) Which is an important thing to note, it
gave people a project to rally around and Jono supported them as they
get started, that's exciting!

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2