Badges/Pilot

We firmly believe that there is no point in doing something if it doesn’t align with our overall mission and goals. We are therefore setting up a system to pilot test if our idea is correct and then periodically check to see if everything is on the right track.

Pilot
To work out the kinks in our system, we will be giving out badges to a select group of participants and asking them for their feedback. The idea is to talk to real people receiving real badges and see what they think. Our goal is to surface any problems or considerations with our Drupal module, tracking system and badge designs before launching.

The things we would like Feedback on:


 * Clarity of our process (email, system interaction, sharing)
 * Clarity of sharing process (how easy/hard is it to understand/sign-on to the Mozilla Backpack)
 * Criteria pages (what do people think? Is it too much information or too little?)
 * People’s expectations about badges
 * People’s general impressions about badges
 * How they might use the badges they receive
 * Ideas or considerations for new badges

The things we would like to evaluate internally:


 * Difficulties with identifying participants
 * Ambiguities
 * Time constraints

Ongoing Evaluation
Once the badge system launches our we plan on surveying our participants in order to get some insight into whether our system is serving the needs of our community. Questions of continuing interest to us are:


 * Do badges motivate users to accomplish certain tasks and actions?
 * Do badges build awareness?
 * Do badges build community by signaling community status or communicating community support?
 * Does community motivate users to improve and increase proper sharing practices?
 * Can badges help build community both at Open.Michigan and/or other communities within the University of Michigan?
 * Do badges properly engage participants?
 * Do badges promote the wrong kind of behavior that distracts or undermines Open.Michigan’s work?
 * How do participants use badges? What value do they gain from Open.Michigan badges?