Badges

Badges are tokens of recognition that you get for certain achievements / accomplishments. Although these are fairly widespread in social knowledge communities and social networks, OSM does not have a way for a user to show off the extent of your contributions, nor for the community to award users for them (apart from existing efforts described below) - but the idea is to have an automated system, badges are awarded when the user hits a threshold.

It would be nice to have a system of badges / recognition for OSM. This page is intended to:

• collect existing efforts in that general direction
• generate ideas for creating such a system, building on these ideas.

Background

Badges and incentives in other communities

For inspiration, look at the badge systems on other web sites:

• StackOverflow
• Foursquare (unofficial)
• Wikipedia

On Incentives and Motivation in communities

There's a number of podcasts that deal in part or in whole with badges, rewards, incentive and competition in communities:

• HanselMinutes #152 with Jeff Atwood on StackOverflow
• HanselMinutes #211 with Jeff Atwood on StackExchange
• Herding Code #87 with Jeff Atwood on StackOverflow and StackExchange
• Herding Code #14 with Jeff Atwood on StackOverflow
• StackOverflow Podcast #87 with community manager Robert Cartaino
• This Developer’s Life 1.1.3 on Competition, with John Skeet

This question on Quora provides some good insights: What if you earned badges at work instead of job titles?

Scientific articles

• "OpenStreetMap–Overview and Motivational Factors" Nama Budhathoki, Dr. Muki Haklay - 2010 - [1]
• "Participant's motivations to contribute geographic information in an online community" - Budhathoki, Nama R. - 2010, [2]
  Tutor: Bruce, Bertram C.; Hopkins, Lewis D.; Haythornthwaite, Caroline A.; Haklay, Mordechai
• "Motivating contributors in social media networks" - Vivek K. Singh,Ramesh Jain,Mohan S. Kankanhalli - 2009, [3]
• "Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities" - Kimberly Ling, Gerard Beenen, Pamela Ludford, Xiaoqing Wang, Klarissa Chang, Xin Li, Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, Al Mamunur Rashid, Paul Resnick, Robert Kraut - 2006, [4]
• "Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites" - Burke, Moira and Marlow, Cameron and Lento, Thomas - 2009, [5]

Badges for OSM

Existing Efforts

Very badgey:

• geobadges.org - For the geo community in general. They're adding some OSM themed badges, working with TeachOSM (new in 2015)
• missingmaps.org/user profiles - Have badges, awarded automatically based on humanitarian mapping edits.

Somewhat badgey:

• How Did You Contribute - general per-user stats. Also 'category' of contribution level
• OpenStreetMap Help site uses StackOverflow style badges to encourage question & answer contributions
• Wiki Userboxes - can be a kind of badge award, but also indicate all sorts of things about a user.
• The Star Awards - An award for big achievements, placed on your OSM wiki user page.
• Lolcat of awesomeness - phased out, but used to be awarded on the wiki Main Page to key contributors
• user:Westnordost/StreetComplete/Achievements

Badge Ideas

Time Spent Mapping

• Account older than a day, week, month, year, years
• Active mapping period of day, month, week, year, years
• 30 consecutive days of mapping
• Logged in since N days

Objects

• Mapped a Road, Path, Footway, Cycleway, Mapped N Roads, Paths, Footways, Cycleways
• Modified N imported features
• Buildings
• POIs (restaurants, etc.)
• Mapped whatever is the feature of the week/month during week/month
• Removed TIGER tags

Tags

• First use of a tag that has been used at least 100/1.000/10.000/100.000 times
• Proposed a tag that has been accepted (and used at least 100/1.000/10.000/100.000 times)

Low Level Operations

• Created N nodes, ways, relations
• Modified N nodes, ways, relations
• Deleted N nodes, ways, relations
  • Deleted dup objects

Transportation

• Created a road
• Fixed a road
• Added turn restrictions/speed limits
• Created new cycle route / bus route relation
• Created N bus stops / train stations

Humanitarian

• Edited a humanitarian area during crisis
• Used humanitarian presets
• N edits during crisis

Editors

• Used Potlatch 1
• Used Potlatch 2
• Used JOSM
• Used Merkaartor

Locations

• Mapped in your town
• Mapped in other town in your state/province/country (not always a good idea)
• Mapped in other continent (again, not always a good thing)

Bug fixes

• Edited an object hilighted by Keepright/OSB/OSMI/Mapdust
• Created a bug
• Closed a bug
• Deleted N dupe nodes

Addressing

• Created an address
• Fixed an address
• Created an address interpolation
• Created an associatedStreet relation

Misc

• Uploaded N GPX tracks
• Wiki editing
• help.osm submissions
• Ran 1/5/10/50/100 mapping parties with a minimum of N participants (how to measure?)

Badges Of Shame

• N duplicate nodes created
• N stray nodes created
• N crossing ways created
• N relations broken

• Your Badge Idea Could Be Here

Challenges

• Badges should reward quality mapping, not sheer quantity. We don't want bogus nodes in the database because people are merely badge-hunting.
• Considering contributions in several OSM domains: Wiki, help.osm.org, mailing lists, real life, IRC, ...

See Also

• Awards
• Games