PROCESS CHANGE: provide digital contribution badges

[Cali0707]

Things to include with your process proposal (delete this text):

• Expected benefits. Who gains the benefits? Why will they benefit?
• Expected costs. Who bears the costs? How heavy are they?
• Timeframe for implementation / rollout.
• Are you willing to drive the process, or is this a request for help?

It would be interesting if we provided contribution badges based on the number of contributions an individual has made to Knative. For example, "Knative Contributor Level 1" could be making a single contribution, level 2 could be 10, level 3 could be 50 or 100, and so on.

Expected Benefits

This would help to encourage contributor growth, and help convert contributors who only make a few contributions into longer term contributors. A lot of contributors to open source projects do so for professional growth, so by providing them with public recognition (e.g. on their LinkedIn profile with a badge) we will be appealing to their interest. By providing multiple levels of the badge, we can encourage contributors to continue contributing beyond their first few contributions to the project and to "level up" their badge.

Expected costs

We would need to pay for some platform like Credly. Perhaps we could get access to the CNCF account that is used to create badges for talks at conferences?

Timeframe

One option would be to check this manually and periodically send the badges out ourselves. Another option would be to use the API for the platform we choose (such as Credly) to automatically send them. We could create a GitHub action that runs periodically and checks contributions, then sends new badges to the email associated with the account.

I would be happy to build the GitHub action or help drive this project in whichever direction is decided

[Cali0707]

cc @aliok

[aliok]

Thanks for creating this ticket Calum. I think this would be a great initiative.

Things to find out:

• Does Credly have an open source free usage?
• How much Credly costs?
• Can we find funding for it?
• Does CNCF have some agreement with Credly that we can leverage?

[aliok]

Related: cncf/mentoring#1105

[mmejia02]

Hello! This sounds really great :) I’m not sure this is super relevant but I was also thinking that you could offer after a couple of contributions (maybe 15?), to give a recommendation or endorsement on the persons LinkedIn? This would be free, but it might also be time consuming for the maintainers.

It might be viewed well by possible contributors as it’s a publically available personalized message on their work ethic they can point to.

[aliok]

Related: cncf/toc#1248

[Cali0707]

@aliok I was speaking to @krook about this last week and he recommended also taking a look at Holopin, it seems like they have an open source program, although it isn't currently active (apparently it is being revamped). They do have public pricing though, so maybe we can assess if that pricing is reasonable

[aliok]

@salaboy Naina told me you're working on something similar on Dapr side. Any information that you can share with us?

[aliok]

There's some progress made on CNCF side on this matter: cncf/toc#1248 (comment)

No details available at this moment though.