Reputation Program Reloaded

Gamification launched on SCN in April 2013, and the community recently enjoyed our three year anniversary of the mission and reputation program! Check out these numbers, which reflect the fun:

While the program has been successful in motivating contributions and engagement, and recognizing valued members in the community, the time has come to evolve beyond the points, badges and leaderboard (PBL) model. In the context of the upcoming 1DX Community Experience launch, we have defined a new program to leverage the emerging best practices in reputation, advances in technology and learnings from three years of running this program.

The new program is designed to encourage quality engagement, and takes a more sophisticated approach to recognizing expert contributions. It will be rolled out in phases, aligned with our agile development approach and affording members time to learn and adjust to the changes.

Here’s a look at what’s coming and when.

What’s Coming At Go-Live

Reputation Snapshot

We respect and appreciate all the effort that has gone into your contributions on SCN. The points, level, and badges in your profile are the representation of your efforts and reputation, and shouldn’t disappear with Jive. We will provide a record of your accomplishments by creating a snapshot of your SCN reputation shortly before the cutover. It will include your lifetime points, level and badges, and be displayed in the new SAP Universal Profile.

Karma Credits & Karma Credits History

Karma credits can be earned for participation in the new SAP Answers platform. Showing you your karma credits will help you get used to the new platform, and keep track of how your contributions on SAP Answers are being received. The Karma Credits total can be found in the sub-header when you are logged in on SAP Answers, with a link to display your karma credits history, both viewable only to you.

Status

Status icons for SAP Community Moderators, SAP Mentors, and SAP Employees will continue to be included in their SAP Universal Profile, and on the content contributed.

Counters

A variety of simple totals that summarize your activity, and how other community members respond to it, will be available throughout the site. The counters provide an objective summary of your activities, and include things like your follower count, total likes and upvotes you receive on posts.

What’s Coming Next

We are taking a phased approach to rolling out the new gamification and reputation elements, in order to give you ample time to get used to things. About a month after launch, a new set of missions and badges will await you!

Missions & Badges

The mission set has been redesigned since the platform switch made some requirements obsolete (e.g., ratings are no longer supported). Missions to recognize blogging, answering questions and onboarding will be available. We are excited to leverage the flexibility of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Gamification Service (HCP GS) to introduce fun new requirements, like time-based rules. The biggest change is that no points will be awarded for earning missions. You will still get a badge to recognize your accomplishments.

What’s Coming After That

Other than the Karma Credits (and you can only see your own), no points will be awarded on the new SAP Community. Rather than recognizing members by points, we will be introducing a scoring system. The scores will begin being calculated in the background at go-live, but won’t be rolled out publicly until it’s certain the activities and weights have been defined correctly, and enough time has passed that it is based on enough data to be reliable.

Reputation Score

Your reputation score is a representation of all the actions you take on the community, and the community’s appraisal of those actions. It reflects the value you contribute, and is calculated based on a weighted combination of the quality of your contributions, your community citizenship and your influence.

Expertise Score

As a replacement for space-specific point totals and Topic Leader recognition, we will rollout an expertise score. The designation of Expert and Knowledgeable will be given to members who reach a high threshold of quality contributions in a given topic primary tag. You will see your progress towards the threshold in any tag you’re active in. No one else will see your progress, but once you reach the threshold, the designation will be prominently displayed in your profile, for all primary tags you qualify in.

Current Expertise Showcase

At a given point in time, any member with a current status of Expert of Knowledgeable will be included and findable in our Expertise Showcase. This dynamic listing of Expert and Knowledgeable members will be searchable by tag, and provide an incredible resource of topic experts to the entire community. A permanent annual archive will also be available.

Reputation Program Reloaded

We are excited to bring these innovations and improvements to the Reputation and Gamification Program. We fully acknowledge that these changes will affect our members in a real way, which is why we took a very user-centered approach to program design. We have worked over the last year with our esteemed Reputation Advisory Group, in an effort to ensure the direction reflected the concerns, hopes and experiences of our members. A great big thank you!

Also, to our colleagues in IT and on the HCP Gamification Service team, thank you for collaborating and innovating with us.

SAP Community Gamification & Reputation Team

Caroleigh, Audrey, Gali & Sajid