Re: Skill badges, mentors, and apprentices

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 11:14 PM, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com> 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
>

I like this name much better than "Template Corps"!

> * 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
> )
>
> * Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
> * Learn about the latest open standards technologies and techniques:
> http://dev.opera.com
> * Contribute to web education: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/
>
>
>