Have you tried Community-Credit.com?
Posted by Dan Rigsby on April 30th, 2008
I am probably the last person to discover this site (I always seem to be the last to know a lot of stuff), but www.Community-Credit.com is a site where you can record your contributions to the development community. "Stupid prizes" are given to the people who record the most community points for a given month. Some of these prizes are actually quite nice and all of them are very geeky. If you do any kind work with the community or even just attend user group meetings, I encourage you to check it out.
What is Community Credit?
Community Credit is a way of showing your contribution to the technology community. Community Credit helps show off the enthusiasm and passion you have for the success of our industry.How do I actually get points?
You can submit points on our Point Submission page. Simply type your name, email address, date you earned the points and point category and they will instantly be added to your total. The points that you earn can be seen on our Community Leaders.
The site was created by David Silverlight back in 2005. David has been a great community contributor and Microsoft Mvp for many years. Microsoft honored him last year when they named Silverlight after him. After reading so much about him, I hope I have the chance to meet him some day. Not only is has he done a lot to promote the community, but he also does a lot of work for non-for-profits through his sites.
So why record your community credit? Well for one, it helps you keep track of everything you have been doing in the community. It can be easy to forget something you have done many months ago. You may use the site to show off to potential employers or friends. Mostly its just fun to compete with your community friends to see who can help out others the most.
When you submit your contributions, you must provide a Url which can be checked to validate your submission. Each Url can only be submitted once. So if a single Url could relate to multiple point credit areas, then you will want to pick the one with the highest total. There is room for this system to be abused, but there is a certain amount of honesty that must be assumed with a site like this. I’m sure if someone is caught abusing the system, then they would be banned or at least deducted a certain amount of points.
The point ranges don’t always make sense. Like a response on a discussion board that is marked as an answer is only worth 150 points, while a blog entry can be worth around 3000. Sometimes an answer on the forums can be longer than a blog post. Writing a book is only 30000 points. I think most books are bigger than 10 blog posts. You can even get points for posting articles to DotNetKicks. But then again, you are probably getting some kind of commission from a blog post too. However, I think the point ranges have been fairly well thought out and are at least level among all of the contributors. They have also added in "curves" so that people who have won prizes in previous months, don’t get as much credit in future months. For example, the top winner in April, may get a 95% curve placed on them such that if they enter something that is normally worth 1000, they will only be awarded 50 points. These curves normally expire after a few months, however certain "Hall of Famers" of the have been slapped with a 50% curve making it harder for them to come out on top in a given month.
The site is so great at recording points, that the INETA Community Champions Program even uses the community-credit.com website to log contributions for their own award system. This program offers its own set of awards that are given to contributions to the development community. However, the points from community-credit don’t automatically cross over to the INTEA program. INETA has their own set of Activities and Activity Types. So if you wish to contribute to INETA and community-credit, then you will have to do a fair bit of dual entry.
Check out my community-credit profile here: http://www.community-credit.com/Portfolios/ShowPortfolio.aspx?UserID=119bae28-46ed-491d-8243-94c452dc1991.
I also created a blog badge (80×15) image that links to my community-credit account. Feel free to download this badge and use it on your own blog, if you want: http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/Images/communitycredit.png.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
How can you say no to stupid prizes for doing stuff you like to do? David Silverlight has done a great job with Community-Credit. He also is part of the CodeCampEvals.org site that we just used for online evaluations for a Code Camp.
By the way, a book is only worth 20,000 points (actual points don’t always match what is listed on the about page). I just published Web 2.0 Heroes so I know. (Yes, that was a shameless plug). I should have said I wrote 20 chapters instead of a book as that would have been worth 60,000 points!
Regardless, Community-Credit is cool. (and I’ll even get points for this response!
Brad!
April 30th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Hey Dan,
Thanks for the kind words and great observations about Community Credit. Regarding the points, they are revised on a pretty regular basis. In fact, last night I increased the value for a book to 30,000, but haven’t adjusted this month’s submissions yet. There is manual process at the end in which the scores are reviewed to make sure that all of the submissions for the winners are correct.
Regarding the INETA Community Champs program, the points actually do carry over to Community Credit, although I believe that there is an issue with it that I will look into. The Champs program is in somewhat of a Beta program right now and will be formally announced shortly.
Thanks, again, for a great blog post!
April 30th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
It would be nice if the site worked. I tried signing up, and now all it gives me is a “Critical Error: SiteUrls.Config” error message when I try to access any page except the homepage.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Nice… Now the homepage doesn’t even work. The site is down.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I’m not affiliated with the site in any way (I just found the site too), but it does appear to be running. However, I did notice that I couldn’t submit new points a couple of hours ago. There could be some updating going on which is also preventing new members. You might try again in a couple of hours. Maybe my post is generating a lot of traffic…
May 1st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hmmm… Interesting idea, though I’ve never viewed community involvement as a competitive sport.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I wouldnt call it a competitive sport. I’ve always been looking for ways to get people more involved in the community. I think every developer should have a tech blog and interact with their peers. If they have a small chance of getting a mouse warmer every once in awhile, it just might help motivate them. And hopefully, it will turn into something that they can find rewarding for themselves.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:08 pm
@Chris The issue with the site is related to the cookies it set. Either try a different browser or clear your cookies for the site. (Either way you can’t log in, though - but David said he was working on it)
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 am
Holy Cow, Aaron, you just solved a problem that was puzzling me for the past two days. As obvious as it may appear, I had never even thought about cookies. I could not quite figure out why some people would get the error and others wouldn’t. To me it seemed like either everybody should get it, or nobody should. I just verified it with a colleague who was consistently getting that error. It fixed it for him (in conjunction with another change). Thanks! I can now reply back to the folks who have been encountering the error and emailed me about it.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:08 am
[...] Have You Tried Community-Credit.com? (Dan Rigsby) [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:11 am
@David - That’s awesome! Blog post comments as a debugging tool… I like it!
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:59 am
Yes Aaron, I thought that it was pretty funny as well. I just blogged about it