Re: Skill badges, mentors, and apprentices

+1 grumpy old man against cutesy-label-of-the-day.

----------------------------
julee@adobe.com
@adobejulee





-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2013 7:33 AM
To: Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com>
Cc: "public-webplatform@w3.org" <public-webplatform@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Skill badges, mentors, and apprentices

>Hi, Chris-
>
>Thanks for kicking this off again. I'd really like to move forward on
>this.
>
>On 12/7/12 7:14 AM, Chris Mills wrote:
>> (Another action item form the last general meeting - write this up as
>> a formal proposal. I thought I'd send my initial thoughts around for
>> comment first, before recording them on the site anywhere)
>>
>> We should start a system whereby people are given recognition for the
>> skills they possess, as well as the contributions they have made to
>> the site. So for contributions, you could have badges for
>>
>> * Q&A moderator
>> * Numbers of answers in Q&A
>> * IRC moderator
>> * Number of new articles
>> * Number of edits
>> * Number of template updates
>> * Translations contributed
>>
>> And then for skills, you could have
>>
>> * Editor
>> * Writer
>> * Template ninja
>> * Design smarts (for those like Seb and Lea, who have contributed
>>styling)
>> * International superhero: Germany, or France, etc. (awarded for
>>certain language contributions)
>> * Domain expert: HTML, or CSS (you have certain specific knowledge of
>>different subjects)
>
>Am I alone in being a grumpy old man who dislikes the whole "pirate /
>ninja / guru / wizard / cutesy-label-of-the-day" designation? I
>understand that it's meant to be fun, and I don't want to be a killjoy,
>but something about it comes off as simply trying too hard. (I
>especially abhor it when someone refers to themselves with one of these
>monikers.) I'd prefer to play it a bit straight here, and call them what
>they are: experts. It has more gravitas.
>
>Maybe I'm being too much of a stick in the mud?
>
>
>> This would act as recognition, as well as letting others know what
>> skills you have, so they can determine who best to approach if they
>> have a query or problem.
>>
>> Moving on from this, we should also run a system whereby experts in
>> different skills should act as mentors for those who want to learn.
>> This is especially relevant to WPD specific skills like editing and
>> template modification, but could perhaps be extended to other things.
>> The idea would be that the mentor could train the apprentice in that
>> specific skill, and then once the mentor is satisfied that the
>> apprentice has reached a certain level of proficiency, award them a
>> skill badge to say so.
>
>This is great.
>
>> This would probably require the creation of a nice new icon set for
>> this purpose. Would Mozilla's open badges project have anything to
>> help with this?
>
>
>
>Regards-
>-Doug
>

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 16:02:50 UTC