IMHO an event like this can launch a more permanent place in our culture for recognition - like #mozlove Friday. I think that should be an intention to avoid repeat cycle of enthusiasm and drought, but I’ll leave that as my opinion and share a few more thoughts triggered by what what Pike said.
That is, that I believe an issue with ‘Recognition’ is that it is a catch phrase I think to mean a number of things:
- Thank you
- Good work! Keep going
- Accomplishment (like first pull request, or completing a participation step)
If we really want to launch in fresh and sustainable way, I believe we also need check what our existing behaviors are, and what they might unintentionally be rewarding, for example I don’t think it would be a stretch to say we have a history of:
- Recognizing people like ourselves (meaning someone you can relate to significantly)
- Recognizing people who are good at raising the profile of their work
- Recognizing people whose efforts are trending towards burn-out.
- Promising recognition, we may or may no be able to deliver.
Finally, thinking about personalized recognition. As part of Marketpulse we asked people to identify in their Mozillian profiles what their preferred forms of recognition (for being thanked, encouraged rewarded) were. And that was interesting because in some cases people deferred recognition entirely. In the David Eaves survey it showed as one of the lowest motivators for participation - although I understand the reason for that trend to be more about ‘why we’re here’ vrs the value of being appreciated.
Anyway, I think this is awesome, but having experimented with this quite a bit in the last year, I wanted to share these thoughts. It’s a huge opportunity, if done right, to help create a culture - surfacing the accomplishments of others. And to show leadership in open culture for how to do that well.