Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and for starting this conversation, @kinofrost.
And thanks for your follow-ups, @whitenoise, @kristof, @sebastian_solidwork and @melissafisher.
Chris, it’s super clear that your posts are well thought out and considered. And no doubt the community values your replies. Or at the very least they have your view on a particular topic that they can take away and do what they like with - even if someone doesn’t reply directly to tell you so. I reflect that this is such a challenge with online forums where folks write detailed & considered posts & replies and might not receive written feedback.
I’m gonna ask some questions at the end of this post as I’d love to learn more from you. Before I do that, let me share some context about why we switched on the leaderboard. I hope this helps.
We switched on the leaderboard as one of our recent initiatives to encourage more people to get involved on The Club – to spend more time here, start conversations, help each other out, build connections and learn. And in the process, if it helped people build an actual habit to get more involved then this is amazing news.
Recent data suggested that things had gone quieter on The Club. We have other initiatives in progress too, such as 30 Days of Career Growth coming soon in June. Plus the 5in5 initiative. And we’re slowly but surely creating new Club posts related to articles on the MoT platform to encourage even more discussions. And replies are a great way to celebrate the author of such articles.
Powering The Club is a service called Discourse, and it offers a gamification plugin. It was very straightforward to switch on. At Ministry of Testing we always have in mind to help folks find ways to get involved in the community in a way that works for them. We recently launched the Contribution page to help spark ideas.
Yet we think there’s a missing piece, a way for folks to receive even more types of rewards for their efforts. Badges, points and the like could all be part of that. And it’s been on our backlog to build profile pages for people to celebrate what they are up to with the testing community (not just the MoT community). However, that’s some time off.
Switching on the Discourse gamification plug-in seemed like a simple way to experiment with some sort of points system. We made assumptions that some folks would enjoy using it and that others wouldn’t. So we took a bit of risk by switching it on. I’m glad we did and have received so much helpful feedback about it. I reflect that if we didn’t switch it on then we wouldn’t have learnt this now – or at least deferred what happens when points are presented back to a community. As far as experiments go, it’s been a success.
I’ll be straight up here. I didn’t expect the leaderboard to be taken as seriously as it has been. I imagined it would be a lighthearted way for folks to “see where they are at over a period of time” and use it to motivate themselves in a way that works for them. I’d also expect a community to use a tool like a leaderboard to support each other and use it as an opportunity to help each other out, not as a way to compete with each other. I’m glad we’ve received useful feedback on the pitfalls of switching on a points-based system with a community. I understand why it makes people feel uncomfortable.
So here are the questions I mentioned I’d get to:
To everyone who is uncomfortable with the leaderboard: I’m super curious to know, what things help motivate you already to contribute to the MoT Community? And what things that don’t exist do you think would help? Is there any form of metric or data point that would help you? How might we build something that acknowledges that any form of points-based system can be gamed in some way? How can we be sensitive and inclusive to folks who are uncomfortable with points-based systems?
It’ll be cool if we could build this feedback into whatever more we do to help folks get involved with the community in a way that works for them.
This is a long post from me so I’ll finish by sharing this: As a community member, focus on doing what you do. That’s all that matters. There’s no judgement here, just appreciation for the many things you have to share.
Thanks again for all your feedback.