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...
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."
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.
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! :)
Might as well just advertise for github. I don't need a badge to tell me I can hack. Use the glider symbol from the game of life. Octocat is stupid its cute but stupid it is meaningless.
Agreed. And using an image associated with github, does "contribute" mean that your changes need to be merged by someone else into their _git_ repo?
I'd like to see one for people who contributed to upstream, it was merged in, production release with their change, and then their code was eventually removed, years later. :)
Good idea though, I'd like to see more of these around town.
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.
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)