Fun times at Mozilla Summit with Mozilla Summit badges
Mozilla summit is an opportunity for Mozillians from all across the globe to come together and celebrate the work we do, the contributions we make, the conversations we have and the products we build, to promote the Mozilla manifesto and ethos. This year, summit took place in 3 different cities, Brussels, Toronto and Santa Clara at the same time attracting nearly 700 people in each location.
The Open Badges team was distributed across these 3 different cities, allowing us the opportunity to bring in our own global contributor community to these locations to partake in the big picture discussion of being a Mozillian as well as being an integral part of the growing open badges community. My colleague Carla Casilli and I were joined by community members Nate Otto working with Dan Hickey at Indiana University on the DML badge system documentation project, Lisa Dawley of Planet Stewards, a DML grantee and Joanna Normoyle of UC Davis, another DML grantee, in the Santa Clara location. Our goals going into Summit were as follows: * Educate Mozillians who are not familiar with open badges about our work and its potential * Get Mozillians excited about how open badges can impact their work and communities * Get folks activated to create open badges for their own communities for the purpose of engagement, skills recognition or any other purpose Our plan of attack was to keep ourselves _very_ busy throughout the summit by participating in the world fair, the innovation fair, hosting a couple badges related sessions each day. It was quite the whirlwind!
I feel as though we have certainly accomplished our goals. In addition, the following are some of my observations and thoughts distilled from numerous conversations that I had at Summit.
Mozillians generally get open badges and many we've talked to are really excited about their potential. These folks have been contributing to Mozilla whether it is through checking in code, evangelizing, creating documentation, working on localization, etc because they believe in the Mozilla mission. While these contributions are not necessarily made with the intended goal of getting recognized, they understand the value of having this work captured in a way that is easily communicated to those that might be interested to know. Many mozillians are contributing to the Mozilla mission in their spare time outside of their separate jobs and careers. In addition to material swag like sweatshirts and bags, providing ways for these contributions to be recognized and documented can help them with new opportunities.
People loved the summiteer badges During the week leading up to Summit, the open badges team rapidly put together a microsite that enabled summit-goers to claim event participation badges. We wanted to take advantage of the captive audience at the summit and encourage folks to try out open badges and create a backpack. Three beautiful badges were designed by our creative lead, Jess Klein, for each summit location. These participation badges turned out to be a big hit at all of our summit locations. During the innovation fair, Carla and I were clamored by folks coming to our station to claim the Santa Clara summit participation badge and reports back from our colleagues at the other two locations mentioned the same. While these were super-lite editions of open badges, definitely not reflective of any skill attainment, they helped folks grok the idea, create their backpack and get engaged.
Mozillians want to be able to better articulate their skills and strengths on mozillians.org. Many mentioned that they'd like to see open badges integrated into mozillians.org and have their earned badges displayed on their profiles. Currently, there is a capability to add tags of skills but these are self-proclaimed. There was mention that badges could be a complement to this feature by providing verified badges that can give more weight to the self-proclaimed tags.
Badge where badging works and makes sense. The reality is, you can put a badge on just about everything. But truth be told, sometimes it just doesn't fit and there's no point in forcing it. We've talked to folks at SUMO, web dev, web QA, etc to understand how they've historically engaged and recognized their contributors and the methods vary a great deal. Sometimes contributors are sent a simple yet personal email expressing gratitude, sometimes they're sent material swag in the form of tshirts, bags, plush toys etc, and sometimes they're given the spotlight on a community call. Badges can capture the contributions made but a personal touch of an email or spotlight in a big gathering goes a long way too. Badges should be considered complimentary and not be seen as a way to replace existing practices that serve a purpose.
dogfooding FTW. If Mozilla intends to make credentialing and recognition systems work more like the web through open badges to help with career and educational opportunities, we better be practicing what we preach. We've had conversations with the people team who are starting to express interest in exploring how badges can be a part of our own hiring practices and considerations.
Summit was crazy busy, exciting, exhausting, rewarding and inspiring all at the same time. I left completely amped thinking about how open badges can cut across many Mozillians needs including contributor and staff recognition, engagement, hiring, recruitment, promoting lifelong learning etc. I'm excited to keep the conversations going and setting up the next steps. Good thing we have another big event, Mozfest!, right around the corner to take all the lessons learned and think about how we can make maximum impact. I'm excited!
