Hello everyone! Welcome to the weekly Thursday Community Call Thread. We really want to engage our community to think and learn about new topics in these calls. Unfortunately not everyone gets a chance to attend the call and those that do don’t always get a chance to speak due to time constraints.
There is value in continuing the types of conversation we start in these calls. We don’t want the call to be the last time people engage with the topics addressed. We want to enrich your days with inspiration and open eyes to new concepts. These topics might be applicable to some of your works or spark a personal interest. It is our goal to facilitate new ideas and creative thinking through this thread.
Community Call Link: Reputation and Badging in Research Ecosystems - SCRF Community Call
11/10 Community Call Recap:
This week’s community call was an exploratory discussion about research badging. Eugene starts us off with two major points to touch on:
- What does reputation really mean and stand for in research environments
- What do you want people to gain reputation from
He goes on to share some thoughts about what the specific points to gain reputation around are and what kind of things do we want to capture in doing so? Badges could end up as a gatekeeping mechanism for certain communities or functions. This point might cause badging to be approached cautiously or with insecurity, so we want to make sure they are a positive enabler and create positive incentives.
Keeping this in mind, do any specific skills or backgrounds stand out as something you would want to know about if we implement badging on the forum? What could help promote more positive engagement between folks on the forum?
Chris then described a system known as the H-index to start drawing ideas from. The H-index is basically a score that allows people in the academic world to understand the relative publishing productivity and citation of their peers. This is something quantifiable to draw from for badging. Additionally, we could use impact on the forum for separate badging. So, should we include both forum and non-forum credentials in badging?
Metrics
Although using quantifiable metrics to create badging could be positive, how do we ensure that these measurements are active when we create badging? Imagine someone obtained great reputation from an article 10 years ago and has done nothing since. Does this require reward? Is it useful to recognize them even though they are not actively contributing? These are some questions to consider.
On another point of quantifiability, do we need to quantify impact in web3 space before traditional research? What do we do about the folks without a research background that are pure web3 but contribute heavily to the space?
Types of Badges
What are the broad level things to badge for? There are many categories of things that were touched upon here including:
- collaboration
- acceptance of criticism
- industry
- courses
What other broad categories do you think fit in?
Value
A big questions to consider is why we want these badges in the first place? What kind of benefits do people think are valuable in a SCRF context? SourceCred was a big topic regarding monetary value for badge holders. What ways do you see SourceCred interacting with badges?
Also, does visibility, such as done with reddit karma, make badges more valuable to hold? Imagine someone being able to see immediately that someone has 10 different badges proving collaboration and contribution in many aspects. Would people be more interested in networking interacting with them?
A few questions to consider from the call
- Should we have tiers of badges with milestones?
- What other projects could collaborate with us for badging?
- What are some related conversations to have on this topic?
If any of these spark your interest or you have other questions / thoughts, please discuss below!