The roads I take...

I just got word that a fire destroyed the Internet Archive Scanning Center in San Francisco.



I have blogged about what the archive has and can do a few months ago and I probably will mention it again when I get to more posts on preserving software.

I think it's in the best interest of everyone, esp. us as Mozillians, to keep this organization going and make the history of the Internet and more openly available to current and future generations.

Please help them to rebuild and continue on their way and make a Donation. I will for sure.

Various groups at Mozilla have been thinking about awarding Open Badges for contributors in the recent year or so (there's even a contributor badges site for easily awarding them). I again and again wonder if we could do that for stability contributions as well, but it's a tough nut to crack.



One idea would be to award badges automatically to people who leave their email in a crash report (i.e. a badge for taking part in our efforts by delivering data through crash reports) - but that would probably end up being a bad badge because you' award people for crashing Firefox (and not award people who don't see crashes). We really do not want people to search for how they can crash so that they can get a badge - after all our mission is to avoid crashes, not provoke them. So, no badges for submitting crashes (thanks to Benjamin for pointing me to that issue right away when I was rolling that idea).

So, how can we potentially award a badge for Stability/"CrashKill" work without rewarding bad behavior?

One thing I could think of was "filed x crash bugs that ended up fixed". That should be relatively easy to get out of Bugzilla data and I think there's no doubt that filing bugs that end up with a fixed resolution is a good thing.
This idea would also open up the avenue for different badges for different amounts of badges (similar to the webdev badges), or to create a badge for developers who fixed x crash bugs, and similar things.

What do you think? Which ideas do you have for awarding badges for contributions to the Mozilla Stability program?