[core-workflow] Tracker workflow proposal

[Ezio Melotti]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'll also suggest another related (and "controversial") idea.  People
> like to reach goals: if they address the 3 issues in their queue they
> have reached the "empty queue" goal.  Addressing 3 of the 5 issues
> isn't quite the same thing.
> I've seen this concept being exploited in three main ways:
>   1) badges/trophies/achievements;
>   2) competitions;
>   3) streaks;
> The first means that the user can get a badge because they closed
> their 10th issues, or triaged their 50th, or submitted 5 patches,
> being the first to reply on an issue for the 10th time, or whatever.
> Even if fixing 3 out of 5 issues won't make you reach the "empty
> queue" goal, maybe you can reach the "10 closed issues".  An example
> of this are StackOverflow badges (e.g.
> http://stackoverflow.com/users/95810/alex-martelli?tab=badges ).
> The second includes "leaderboards" or "awards" for being above
> average.  Examples of this are Twisted high score
> (http://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/) or charts like
> http://www.ohloh.net/p/python/contributors (at some point I was the
> most active contributor and was trying to keep my contributions going,
> but then Serhiy became a contributor... :).  Something similar could
> be done by mentioning "exceptional" results in the weekly summary
> report (e.g. people who fixed/contributed to the most issues).
> The third is about perseverance.  Every day/week you have a goal to
> meet, if you reach it you streak counter increases, if you miss it the
> counter starts again from zero.  Once you start building up a high
> count, you really don't want to miss your goal and start everything
> from scratch.  Here the goal might be close 3 issues per week, or
> something similar, and could have associate badges ("contribute every
> day for a month", "close 3 issues per week for 3 weeks in a row", etc)
>
> While I understand that probably most of the core devs would be
> against similar things, this might motivate new users and make them
> "addicted" to the tracker, while making their experience more
> enjoyable, and the example I linked show that similar things exist
> even in these environments (and not only on the micro-transaction
> based smartphone games :).  People who don't care about this
> (different people are more or less competitive) could just ignore it.
> OTOH this might have a negative side-effect if users start closing
> issues randomly just to get the "100 closed issues" badge, but this is
> not difficult to avoid.
>

See also the "Gamification" section of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect#Applications .