

Nerd Merit Badges: 01 - Contribute to an Open Source Project - tlrobinson
http://nerdmeritbadges.com/

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jballanc
I think this is a lovely idea!

Ok, bit of a tangent, but I was discussing this the other day with a friend...

Sometime around the late 70's/early 80's something happened in America. People
started working longer hours, watching more TV, and generally socializing
less. Membership in the Elks, Scouts, Rotary Club, Shriners, Knights of
Columbus, etc., etc. all declined. The statistic that I think sums it up the
best is this: The average number of picnics attended by Americans has dropped
60% since 1975!

What does this have to do with anything? Well, it used to be that social
groups formed primarily based on proximity, and secondarily based on similar
interests. What I see happening now, with social networks and such, is that
being flipped on it's head a bit. Still, I think we're beginning to see an
upswing in the picnic rate, as it were. (The Obama campaign was, I think, a
potent indicator of this...)

This is one of the reasons that I love GitHub so much. Forget the git vs. hg
vs. bzr vs. etc arguments. GitHub is a coder's social network! It seems only
natural that someone should start formally organizing around this idea...

(also, see Zed's <http://freehackersunion.org/> for more of the same idea)

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wallflower
It sounds like your friend may have heard of and/or read this book: "Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community". It's on my ever-
growing to-read queue.

"In a groundbreaking book based on vast new data, Putnam shows how we have
become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our
democratic structures-- and how we may reconnect.

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our
connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and
communities.

Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last
quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer
organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less
frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even
bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not
bowling in leagues."

<http://www.bowlingalone.com/>

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danteembermage
I'm an avid scouter (currently an assistant scoutmaster for a troop in
Arizona) and I'd been trying to think of some iteration of "Hacker scouts"
that would make sense. I think this is a great -launch the simplest thing that
works and iterate- way to go about it.

It would be interesting to have levels of badges so level one is getting a
commit, level three might be hit X downloads or something like that.

Also, I'm going to go try to propose "Make asteroids in scratch" as badge
number two.

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tlrobinson
I realize this may come across as an advertisement, but I'm not affiliated
with them. I just thought it was a clever idea.

~~~
ggrot
I agree. Very clever, but I don't particularly understand why they chose a cat
for open source projects. Someone care to fill me in?

~~~
tlrobinson
It's the GitHub.com logo. And it's an Octocat ;)

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jjs
You've overlooked an important detail: how will I manage to look nerdy while
wearing a _sash?_

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zitterbewegung
There should be a vendor / company neutral symbol.

~~~
nerdmeritbadges
You're right, there probably should, but we just liked the octocat. It's
friendly, it's dripping, it's an abomination against nature.

Just so we don't seem like we're spamming the board, I'll add: * We're VERY
interested in "buffs" and levels. Girl scout badges sometimes have little gold
doohickeys that attach to a main badge with a chain. We think that would be
cool. Also, we think that meaningful border-colors would be awesome. So far,
we're thinking of black-bordered DEmerit badges: "Destroyed non-backed-up
data." God, I've earned that one.

Your suggestions are absolutely welcomed. Twitter us at @nerdmeritbadges.
Right now, we're working on the Regular Expressions merit badge.

Oh, and the best place for a sash? Your laptop lid, naturally! :)

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pmjordan
What about a kernel hacker badge? For getting a patch accepted into an open
source operating system kernel. One step up from the OSS badge.

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jscn
This reminds me of [http://www.scq.ubc.ca/order-of-the-science-scouts-of-
exempla...](http://www.scq.ubc.ca/order-of-the-science-scouts-of-exemplary-
repute-and-above-average-physique/)

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charlesju
I love Github as much as the next rails nerd, but they need to improve public
project discovery. There is no pagination on the projects when you sort by
followers, this is a huge error they need to fix.

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shaunxcode
If this is 01 what is 00? Learning to count with arrays?

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bdr
What is the picture on the badge?

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jballanc
Octocat!

(see: <http://github.com>)

