Pulse looks interesting. One thing my team at Red Hat works on is trying to find ways of proactively measuring community health, which is essential for any contributor-focused community. Next time you have a few minutes, ping me on IRC, I’d love to talk about possible collaboration around Pulse.

Here are some parts we’ve been trying or working with:

https://fedorahosted.org/ekg/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dashboard
http://github.com/mpdehaan/lookatgit

Say what the person did to be there. Otherwise how are people going to aspire to achieve better if they don’t even know what it takes to get named on the list?

Yes, I think Pulse could be used for tracking data, but apart from that I think I could be nice to have more social content, with features similar to linkedit

- Give thanks and recommendations
- Have different cute views of your work
- Add nice comments from mailing list or bugzilla
- list contributor of the project

As for “something like ohloh”, there is Pulse, the everything tracker I started developing to help the documentation team.

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/pulse/web/

I need to dust it off and get it running again. There’s a scoring system in there, because I was hoping to highlight people who’ve recently put in a lot of work. But now I’m not so sure about that, because of some of the divisive karma-chasing I’ve seen in the Launchpad community.

We have a sensitivity in our team around wide public praise specifically because of the experience I mention in this comment:

http://iquaid.org/2009/11/11/calling-out-superrockstars-considered-harmful/#comment-3676

We made the mistake of backing a “Fedora Award” that brought this whole topic forward and made it very clear what a mistake the whole idea was.

OK, so how does this help your question?

One thing I probably glossed over in my post is the idea of a recognition spectrum. It’s not all or none, and it has to be scaled to fit the size and interaction of a group. For example, group/team recognition works great. Then let the individual teams work out amongst themselves keeping people stoked about their work. I do that formula with e.g. Fedora Docs. I’ll do a blog post about how rocking the group is, with such a huge amount of work done, etc. Then I’ll post something another time to just the list, highlighting the achievement of individuals.

Think of it like a recreational soccer/football team. (A rec team isn’t competitive, just friendly competition, sort of like FLOSS.) Each team gets kudos for how well they play games. Within each team, the coaches, captains, and invididual members give in-team praise for practice and game play.

I love to do something at e.g. a FUDCon where we embarass someone with in-room praise and applause. Those are the situations where our humanity can overcome our feelings of disenfranchisement. You are in the room showering praise on a great person who doesn’t get enough of it. That’s when the, “Hey, everyone, three cheers for Foo!” is perfect. Just as, five minutes later, Foo is getting teased for something else.

Not every social interaction, such as rewarding praise, translates equally well to the wider online world.

Maybe having a place where you can check all your contributions is a good start, something like ohloh for GNOME, with personal feedback from the community.

Moreover, I think asking people who normally idle/assist users in IRC to also idle/assist users in another real-time messaging format might be a tough nut to crack.

As for the comments and such . . . It sounds interesting. I agree with others’ concerns about how to handle comment spam and internationalization issues. As a point of reference for help feedback, it might be worth looking at some sample Gmail help topics: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6593 You’re being all visionary and cool, though, while I’m just saying, “Let’s see what other folks do.”

Now, with that said though, and I don’t know how GNOME is, but I know in KDE it gets annoying when distros patch and it is their fault. There are quite a few bugs like this in KDE Bugzilla, and I am willing to bet the same goes for GNOME. See, this would be a tricky part, because a part of me says yeah, have Ubuntu patch to point to #ubuntu and the other half is no, don’t patch, keep them going to #gnome or whatever.

Figuring this whole thing out will be a blast though How about working with the OpenDesktop social API that they put out and have been having the competitions for? That might be something to keep in the back of your mind too during the planning phase.