Monthly podium?

[nomadscientist]

Monthly podium per topic (with automated news, like the new tutorials) for:

• Most lines of code updated
• Most reviews
• Most issues
• Most PRs

Something like that? Make a fun little competition for community resource updates?

[hexylena]

we considered and rejected this in the past:

• those, the "standard" metrics, would be unhelpfully dominated by regular contributors, giving pressure potentially to newcomers who feel like they have to do everything
• it potentially fosters the wrong culture where opening PRs and merging Many of them is shown as valued, rather than the culture we want to foster where all contributions even small ones are valued.
• as a reward/encouragement mechanism it is interesting, but only if we can use it for encouragement to participate more, but that also feels deeply gross because we'd be gamifying to extract free labour from volunteers who are often minority group members. That point was what more or less killed the discussion with @shiltemann and myself.
• there set of people who show off their GTN profile, and the set of people who would likely be at the top of any metrics, is disjoint, I strongly suspect. I have the feeling it trends towards smaller contributors who want to put it on their resume, less established researchers who want to show off something nice

as an alternative we thought about Badges like GitHub does, but again it comes to the issue of defining a good metric/badge. It can't be "most lines", or most anything. Maybe something like "great contribution" (every tested commit passed tests on their PR) which will actually hit many drive by contributors who just contribute a typo correction. Or similar. That particular metric would be annoying to calculate but, theoretically possible. And I think you'd want to have maybe 4-8 of these badge ideas before shipping, just to ensure good coverage/diversity.

[hexylena]

more discussion

• hackvent gives badges but they're on an external site. big whoop. who is using that
• most page views? it'll be the same page every single month and just speaks to popularity of topic rather than anything else
• do people want badges? is that useful? motivating?
• how many newcomers (or regulars) actually share their GTN profile? (community input welcome!)
• badges would make newbie pages look better but, we could also be better about e.g. switching to cards rather than the list format that looks so boring. hiding graphs until they have 5 contributions or something

[hexylena]

• rotating monthly contributor of the month? lots of work. galaxy did it like 5 times before running out of steam
• monthly blog post highlighting newcomers? could be automated. but is it useful for them?