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Badgebot
A bot that allows you to give badges to your peers for work on projects.
According to the Badge Alliance "a badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. From the Boy and Girl Scouts, to PADI diving instruction, to the more recently popular geo-location game, Foursquare, badges have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors, represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts. A “digital badge” is an online record of achievements, tracking the recipient’s communities of interaction that issued the badge and the work completed to get it. Digital badges can support connected learning environments by motivating learning and signaling achievement both within particular communities as well as across communities and institutions."
At Bocoup, we will have a badge database. In the database there will be a list of badges with descriptions. This can be edited so long as we follow the data model.
The badges that we will be issuing are peer to peer badges. This means that badges will be issued by peers and colleagues, rather than a designated "badge issuer" who has some form of higher level credentials.
There are two types of badges - digital and open. This bot will issue open badges. Digital badges are basically some kind of online representation of your skill. An Open Badge, however "take[s] that concept one step further, and allows you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through credible organizations and attaches that information to the badge image file, hard-coding the metadata for future access and review. Because the system is based on an open standard, earners can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of their achievements — both online and off. Badges can be displayed wherever earners want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning."(Source: Badge Alliance)
Open Badges have a technical specification for "packaging information about accomplishments, embedding it into portable image files as digital badges, and establishing an infrastructure for its validation. This specification includes term definitions for representations of data in Open Badges. These term definitions appear in the current JSON-LD context (v1.1) for the Open Badges Standard."(Source: openbadgespec.org)
Staff can see what a badge is in two ways:
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They can dm badgebot by writing "badge list" to see simple wiki style definition of all the badges. They can then type " describe [badgename]" to see a detailed description of a specific badge.
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They can take a look at the database.
Metadata about the issuer is defined in JSON at a URL/IRI defined by the BadgeClass’s issuer property.
Our data should look like:
{ "@context": "https://w3id.org/openbadges/v1", "type": "Issuer", "id": "https://bocoup.com/organization.json", "name": "Bocoup", "image": "https://static.bocoup.com/assets/img/bocoup.png", "url": "https://bocoup.com/", "email": "badges@bocoup.com", "revocationList": "https://bocoup.com/revoked.json" }
Staff can see a list of their badges on their "people" pages at Bocoup.
For the first release/ experiment we should build around the communal affordances of peer recognition in the workplace. Badges that might be issued here could include:
- Mentor - You have provided mentorship for a colleague or client at Bocoup.
- Communicator - You are great at explaining your perspective to clients and colleagues at Bocoup.
- Leadership - Your leadership skills have pulled us all together at Bocoup.
- Team player - You complete me - well, you complete the team and make things run better at Bocoup.
- Good listener - Your listening skills are invaluable to our projects at Bocoup.
That's pretty awesome.
You will only receive the badge one time, but you will:
- still get a notification
- see that documented in the people page as "Isaac got the mentor badge and was endorsed three times."
- be able to see who gave you the badges
Bocoup currently does a light touch skills assessment of staff. This is done by sending a questionnaire to staff a few times a year that asks staff to rate their technical skills. There are several issues with this, including:
- soft skills aren't always accounted for
- humble staff (or cocky staff for that matter) won't rate themselves as the world sees them
- this doesn't take into account interest levels
- this doesn't take into account skills in relationship to projects at Bocoup
Additionally, the skills are currently represented in a way that optimizes for the experience of account managers viewing this data to evaluate who should work on what project, which is great but their are so many more interesting possibilities around learning and skill development that could be considered.
Open Badges, done in a peer to peer environment will allow staff to:
- acknowledge their peers
- evaluate and manage their skills data on an ongoing basis
- associate projects with skills and learning
There are so many opportunities to build this into our current workflow. Here are a few examples:
- At a postmortem
- At a critique
- At a 1 on 1
- When someone just did something impressive on a project and you want to capture it
- While working on the Harvard project with Bmac, Jess notices what a great mentor Bmac is to the junior developers at Harvard.
- Jess goes to #hbp slack channel (where Bmac and Jess hang out for Harvard)
- Jess texts "/badge bmac for mentorship" in Slack
- Bmac gets an email saying "Jess gave you a badge for mentorship on #hbp"
- Bmac's badges are listed on his page at people.bocoup.com
someone who is new to the bot or needs help:
- Sue has never used the bot before but she wants to know what it's all about
- Sue types "/badgebot help" in Slack
- Sue sees a list of badgebot commands in her Slack channel provided by badgebot. It says " When you type "/badge [USERNAME]in a [SLACK channel] it will issue the user a badge."
if someone says something to badgebot that it doesn't understand:
- Wilto goes in to Slack and types "/badgebot happy"
- Badgebot does not understand this command
- Wilto gets a message that says "I don't understand that, type /badgebot help for more info, buddy."
after I figure out that userflow:
- Brian is looking for someone who could be a good fit for project "Sparrow"
- Brian thinks that Bmac might be right, but he isn't sure what it's like to work with him.
- Brian goes into Slack and types "/badges bmac"
- Slack returns a list of badges that Bmac has been given, who it was given by, where it was given and when it was given.