Community Team badges for user profiles

There has been a bit of discussion about this in the past and recently, but now that we have a really solid idea of how the deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. programme works and a mostly clear view of who is and isn’t a deputy, it would be valuable to look at creating a ‘proper’ Community Team badge for WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ profiles. How most contributor teams work is that they have one badge for general contributors to the team and a second badge (that looks like the first, but has a shaded background) that is for the ‘coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.’ group of that contribution team (see my profile and read the badge tooltips if you’re unfamiliar with the differences).

The full list of badges is here – we currently have only one for ‘Community Team’ that is a standard badge with no background. That badge is assigned to anyone on the team (which need to be added manually) as well as automatically for anyone who is added as a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organiser. I would propose the following changes:

  1. We change the existing badge to a ‘Community Contributor’ badge and it remains as being auto-assigned for WordCamp organisers and we could maybe also manually assign it for meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organisers if that makes sense for the programme.
  2. We then add a new ‘Community Team’ badge (which has the shaded background), which would be manually assigned to the community team, super deputiesProgram Manager Program Managers (formerly Super Deputies) are Program Supporters who can perform extra tasks on WordCamp.org like creating new sites and publishing WordCamps to the schedule. and deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook..

This would bring the Community badges more in line with the other contribution teams (consistency FTW) and it would also indicate who is involved in things centrally and who is a local organiser. Badges like this are a nice way to acknowledge people’s contributions to WordPress, so it’s more than just a thing to show off – I think it actually encourages increased involvement.

The issue, of course, is how we would decide the criteria for who would receive the Team badge. I would suggest that people who meet the following criteria would receive the badge:

  1. Anyone who works full time for the Community Team.
  2. The Super Deputies.
  3. Deputies who have answered at least 30 tickets on Help Scout in the last 3 months (in reality, these numbers would probably be somewhat flexible as some tickets take a lot more time than others).
  4. WordCamp MentorsEvent Supporter Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. who have mentored at least 2 (or 3?) WordCamps in the last 12 months.

This would mean that new deputies would not immediately receive the badge just for completing the deputy training and, as a result, badges would only be given for active work in the community (as is the intention behind the profile badges).

In the name of not erasing the efforts/contributions of formerly active contributors, I don’t think we need to keep track of ongoing activity. We can use the 30 tickets in 3 months metric as an initial milestone, but we don’t want to retroactively undermine someone’s past work if they fall below that milestone later on.

Probably the best way to manage this (as manually assigning badges does create extra work of course) is to check in on our active deputies every quarter and manually assign badges as required. It would be great if we could automate this quarterly check, but not the end of the world if we cannot do so.

If everyone is happy with this, the first step would be to design the new badge (which consists solely of adding a shaded background to the existing one) and then submitting a MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. request to have it added along with the initial list of to whom it will be assigned.

If you have any major concerns about this or any votes of confidence then please comment here and we can get this done.

#feedback, #badges