Contribute/Recognition

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Recognizing volunteers for their contributions will deepen and extend relationships and will help us develop casual contributors into core contributors.

Recognition can be an item like a badge or can be a recognition of potential by helping volunteers develop through mentoring and training.

Tell me more about Recognition

How does recognition differ around the world

Notes from the recognition sessions held at 2013 Summit

Santa Clara Session: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/recognition-guide-sc

Combined Notes from Brussels and Toronto:

Recognition brainstorming exercise from Community Builders meetup at MozCamp Asia in 2012: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/contributor-recognition-brainstorm

Ways to recognize

Introductions

You can introduce a new volunteer who has started helping you out. At the Monday project meetings there is a space to introduce new volunteers and you can add information there.

• For example, here's the introduction to the set of new volunteer developers for Firefox 25

Say Thanks

A simple note of thanks is a great way to recognize someone.

• email
• blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/community/category/spotlight/
• postcard
• etc.

Badges

Carla Casilli has some great things to say about badges here: http://carlacasilli.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/a-foundational-badge-system-design/

Excerpt: "A badge system structure for many After much thought and many contemplative examinations, I’ve developed an archetypal badge system structure that I’m happy to recommend to the open badges community. Here are the many reasons why I think you’ll want to implement it.

   It’s simple.
   It’s modular.
   It’s easy to implement.
   It encourages a range of creativity.
   It works for organizations of vastly different sizes.
   It accomplishes the difficult task of working from bottom up, top-down, and middle out.
   It not only allows for growth, it thrives on it.

Introducing the 3 Part Badge System This badge structure is the one that I developed for the Mozilla badge system that we are in the process of building. I’m calling it the 3 Part Badge System (3PBS). It’s composed of three interlocking parts and those three parts create a flexible structure that ensures feedback loops and allows the system to grow and evolve. Or breathe. And by breathe, I mean it allows the system to flex and bow as badges are added to it.

While some community member organizations have expressed a desire for a strict, locked-down, top-down badge system to—in their words—guarantee rigor (and you already know my thoughts on this), this system supports that request but is also designed to include active participation and badge creation from the bottom up. I’d say it’s the best of both worlds but then I’d be leaving out the middle-out capacity of this system. So in reality, it’s the best of all possible worlds.

This approach is a vote for interculturalism—or the intermingling and appreciation of cultures—in badge systems. Its strength arises from the continuous periodic review of all of the badges, in particular the team / product badges as well as the individual / community badges."

Making badges at badges.mozilla.org

• Template for designing badges and criteria
• I work at Mozilla. How do I make a badge?
  • Start here: https://badges.mozilla.org/en-US/

These badges are great for badges that can be created by anyone within the community and do not have specific visual requirements. An individual or community can create any type of badges they like.

Open Badges Initiative

http://www.openbadges.org/

• This is best for entire badge systems, vouching for verifiable skills/experience and learning.
• Learn more by following their blog http://openbadges.tumblr.com/

Coming soon! Badgekit-- currently in Private Beta http://badgekit.openbadges.org/

Examples

• WebQA Badges: https://quality.mozilla.org/2013/12/web-qa-gets-badges/
• IT badge designs: http://cl.ly/image/1e3t0h1F093t and http://cl.ly/image/403E170C3t0J
• Creative Collective badge designs (from old Creative Collective site): http://www.flickr.com/photos/musingt/3811604179/in/set-72157617765620270
• More: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/Internal-Moz-badge-issuers

Other

• Notes on other people interested in issues badges:
• Friend of the Tree, invitation to events, Credits, spotlight blog post, LEAD, module owner/peer, timeline of contributions...

Measuring Effectiveness

There are a few things to consider when measuring the effectiveness of your badge program:

• What are your goals? Are you interested in growing contributors or retaining contributors (ie, stopping churn)?
  • This is likely to be tied to the maturity of your community. New communities just getting started will likely be interested in growth (ie, there is not much of an existing community yet to need to worry about retention) and more established communities will likely be interested in retention (ie, their processes have evolved where they have pathways to get new people involved and they want to keep people engaged)
  • The answer to this determines how you analyze the data (ie, a new community can have a simpler approach to analytics that doesn't try to manage both the entrance of new contributors and the exit of existing contributors becoming inactive)

• What's a meaningful time frame for growth? Can a new contributor progress through the set of contributor activities for your project in days, weeks, months. For instance, a new Firefox coding contributor would take multiple releases to go through the process of getting their development environment set up, finding a good bug, creating a patch, going through review process, etc.

• Since badges are opt-in, can you combine the data about who chose to accept a badge and who was eligible for one but didn't accept it? Could these two groups act as separate cohorts for a twin study?

Gear

Recommendation: The issuing of swag should be considered in a manner similar to the process used to develop a badge system. In short that means teams should work to define the process or steps required to "earn" different levels of swag. Regular team review of community contribution will help to ensure that swag (as well as badges) are fulfilling the desired function and supporting the desired recognition.

We recommend creating opportunities for your team to regularly consider who you would like to recognize by sending a shirt, mug, etc. These regular reminders could be done by:

• Add an agenda item to regular team meetings asking for nominations for volunteers who have made important contributions recently. Make sure to include link to the GearStore wiki page so people know where to go to get delivery scheduled.

• Update the badges.mozilla.org site to send notifications to point people when people earn a certain badge. This wouldn't be used to automatically issue swag, but would be a useful reminder for team members to consider nominations for contributors who you'd like to recognize. (Note: this feature doesn't exist now on badges.mozilla.org).

• Create a regularly recurring contributor spotlight, such as the Reps of the month program

• Thought: This may require developing a sort of swag pyramid that indicates levels of expertise or commitment required to earn different levels of swag. Or not, because this may make the system too rigid.

Where to schedule delivery for swag: https://wiki.mozilla.org/GearStore

Case study: AMO points and incentives program

School Credit

Officially vouching for contributions can be a very powerful way to recognize student volunteers who would like to receive school credit for their efforts.

Standard verification letters from academic institutions often contain language that we can't accept though. For example, language that references an internship can't be used to verify volunteer contributions.

Academic institutions want to find good learning experiences for their students and they may be willing to work with us to modify their acceptance letters. Dia created the following template student contribution letter after working with a University to change the language in their standard form.

Feel free to use this template as a starting point for a discussion with an academic institution you'd like to partner with to recognize existing student contributors or to create a source of future contributors.

• File:Student Contributor Letter.pdf (PDF file)
• File:Student Contributor Letter.odt (ODT file)

There is also a template form for a completion letter that documents what activities have been accomplished by the student.

• File:Contributor Completion Letter.odt (ODT file)

Invitation to Mozillians

Inviting a contributor to mozillians.org, our community directory, is a great way to recognize someone and also get them better connected with Mozilla. This directory is a resource to make it easy for Mozillians to learn who is involved, what they do and how to connect with them. It also allows contributors to receive email communications from Mozilla with important news and announcements.

Learning Resources

We can give contributors access to various learning resources: Rosetta Stone, Safari, LEAD/TRIBE, etc.

Certificates

For long-time core contributors, you can recognize them in a very heartfelt way by creating a unique certificate to honor their involvement. Some examples include:

• Community Leadership Award given to Channy at MozCamp Asia in 2012

• Distinguished Engineer award and videos

• Ubuntu's membership certificate