The seventh Community Asks sprint has come to a close. I’m incredibly proud to announce that we were able to complete the work we set out to do in an incredibly short period of time, and we still managed to achieve auditability and set the stage for the future of a brand new feature: Community Badges! We’re hopeful that, for communities that have a defined use-case for them, these will be great tools to get people participating in ways that are underrepresented or exceptional across the network.
Community Badges: How does my site get one added?
I’ve written up a faq-proposed post, What are Community Badges? – that we can refine together – about what Community Badges are, how they are created, and the general guidance you should use when proposing a new one. With that said, a general flow of Propose and Refine, Escalate, and Utilize can be followed.
To Propose and Refine a badge, any community member can post on a site’s meta and propose a new Community Badge. When doing so, you should provide the name of the badge, its class (Bronze, Silver, or Gold), the description for the badge, whether or not the badge can be earned multiple times, and finally the criteria to earn the badge. The community can come together to discuss and align on the badge’s details and decide whether they agree that the badge should be added.
These badges should ideally be for well-defined criteria, especially to address the concerns of moderator favoritism. Further, they should be for fairly exceptional criteria to avoid overuse. These badges can be as special or as common as the community feels is appropriate, but our general guidance is that these should have a fairly high bar to earn to avoid a situation where moderators have to award badges too frequently. Therefore, moderator input is fairly crucial to these conversations, as they are who are entrusted with the ability to add them, and their capacity to do so must be considered. Once the community is aligned on a need for a Community badge, we can proceed to Escalate.
To Escalate, a moderator can retag the meta post from the proposal stage with status-review, which will put the post on the Community department’s radar as a ticket. The Community Manager handling the request will review the consensus of the community and ensure that the badge is appropriate to add. If there are any concerns, the Community Manager will reach out to the mod team of the site and try to resolve any conflicts. Once any potential issues are resolved, the Community Manager will add the badge and it will be immediately available to be awarded by a moderator.
The Utilize step is pretty simple: Moderators now have access to distribute the new Community Badge as they see fit, so they should do so where appropriate! Events, exceptional mentorship, longstanding spam-fighting, you name it, you can make a badge for it and start helping to recognize users’ efforts.
The Community Team has also long wanted the ability to reward users for certain above-and-beyond participation, and this feature allows us to create badges without getting a developer involved. In addition to communities coming up with their own custom badges, we may use this feature for certain initiatives as we ramp up our engagement efforts this year.
How are Community Badges implemented?
Everywhere you’d expect to see badges, you’ll see Community Badges. You’ll see them in your profile’s Badges list, along with all of the other badges you’ve earned. On the Badge list page, they’ll appear at the bottom, above the list of Retired badges. The following image is taken from a test environment with a bare-bones example badge:
Awarding badges is very easy for moderators. Moderators have access to a dashboard from a user’s profile, and from it they have a list of moderation actions available. At the top is the ability to “award community badge”:
Clicking on this will take you to a dedicated page to award a Community Badge to the user. You’ll be able to select a badge from the list of Community Badges and hit “Grant Badge”. Super simple! Here’s how the page looks:
We also wanted to ensure that we denote which moderator awarded which badges for auditability purposes. Moderators will be able to see this when viewing an awarded badge’s page. The following image of this view is from a test environment with an example badge. The “X” icon is a developer-only option that will not be available to moderators:
What comes next?
As you’ve pointed out, we have some documentation to update. We’ll be reviewing our mentions of badges and ensuring that all guidance is adequately updated to account for the Community Badges feature. Further, we’re going to be getting the ball rolling on a couple sites that we’ve identified as being particularly well-suited for adding Community Badges, and that’ll involve reaching out to their meta sites and trying to ensure they’re well-supported as they define what kind of badges they’d like added.
We’re excited to see the ideas you have across the network for new Community Badges that suit your specific communities, and we’ll be around to support you in your endeavors to propose them!
