ARTICLE

Ubuntu Accomplishments System Spec

by | Tue 25 Oct 2011

Some time ago I was kicking around some ideas about how we reward our community for different types of contribution. While Launchpad karma is useful for indicating who has been working on code, bugs, translations, and specs, it doesn’t cover a wide variety of community contributions and is also not a particularly exciting way of visualizing these achievements. I believe that many folks really want to feel a sense of ownership over their accomplishments, be it as simple as reporting a bug or as complex as contributing a package upload.

As such, I started developing some ideas around a trophies-like system for Ubuntu contributions. I was keen though for this not to be a *pointless achievement* system. As an example, contributing *100 bug comments* is not necessarily and indication of an accomplishment, but instead an indication of *traffic* (all those comments could be garbage). I think it is much more important for such rewards to be tangible affirmations of a quality contribution. As such, this system is called an *Accomplishment System* and is more focused on things you do in Ubuntu that are accomplishments in your contributions.

Fortunately, around the time of having this idea, [Stuart Langridge](https://www.kryogenix.org) was visiting Erica and I with his daughter. We did what we normally do: stay up until 4am discussing an idea and fleshing out the details and then I started writing everything down into a document. We then discussed it with [Daniel Holbach](https://daniel.holba.ch/blog/) and I discussed it furthewr with Randall Ross (LoCo community) and Jim Campbell (Ubuntu Docs Team) and at that point the idea stalled while we got busy with the release.

I now want to present the idea thus far with you all and to invite discussion, and more importantly, to motive some of you coders who are interested in the idea to consider writing some code to implement it. Stuart wrote a proof of concept which is something that could be built upon.

To get things rolling, I have [put the spec so far on the wiki](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AccomplishmentsSpec), complete with all my mock-ups, and I [registered a blueprint for a UDS session](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-p-ubuntu-accomplishments-and-trophies) which I hope to see some of you participate in.

If you are interested in implementing this vision (particularly if you are a Python coder, let me know in the comments!

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