Skill badges, mentors, and apprentices

(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)

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 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?

Chris Mills
Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
Co-chair, web education community group, W3C
Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://my.opera.com/chrismills/blog/2012/07/12/practical-css3-my-book-is-finally-published)

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Received on Friday, 7 December 2012 12:14:38 UTC