Turn it up - Rocking certifications

Ben — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:48:35 +0000

Big news for Certified To Rock! We've just published a new algorithm that has updated scores for the 6,000 rockstars already in the system, and added scores for around 18,000 more rockstars. We now have scores for over 24,000 rockstars! This is the first update to the scores and algorithm since our launch during DrupalCon San Francisco.

More metrics

This release includes a few new metrics, and changes to the algorithm, meaning scores are calculated differently than before. We believe this change has produced a better measurement of rockstardom.

"What! My score's gone down?"

While most people received scores for the first time or saw an increase in their previous score with this release, some will notice that their scores went down. It's unfortunate, but if you continue to rock it, your score will increase.

While we feel this algorithm is a major improvement over the original one, the system is of course not quite rocking at the level we want yet. We are already working towards future releases of the algorithm to try to measure a broader range of contributions to the Drupal project and provide even better scores.

More rockers certified

"Where's my score?"

First, usernames on Drupal.org are case-sensitive, so check that you're entering your Drupal.org username with exact casing. Second, 24,000 rockstars isn't a lot when we have about 500,000 accounts registered on drupal.org. If you've changed your name recently, try old versions of your name (and consider that changing your name makes it hard for robots and humans to track your reputation). If you still aren't listed, let us know and we'll get you included soon.

Graph of scores (click for larger)

The above graph shows many more people with a 1 than any other score. If you're not satisfied with your score, don't be discouraged! It's pretty easy to move from a 1 to a 2, and as you can see once you move to a 4 or 5 you are really in the top number of participants in the Drupal project. Greg has written a little bit on how you can improve your Certified to Rock score.

The future for Certified to Rock

There are lots more things we want to do, maybe you could help us with some of them?

We'd love to provide more frequent measurements. This one is pretty much on us, but we hope to get to 4 releases of new measurements per year and 2 releases of new algorithms within the year 2011.
We're really happy to hear your excitement for badges and embeddable widgets. Believe me, I'd love to write those and they are a high priority.
We also want to make scores more accurate. Remember that the site is 100% automated based on publicly available data. So think about the things you can do for the Drupal project that demonstrate your skill, how we might scrape that data to associate it with your user account, and then how we should weight it (is it the most important thing? something small?). Metrics need to be hard to fake and doing more of it must improve the Drupal project - if someone could get a high score by creating dozens of low quality duplicate modules that would be a problem...we need metrics that make Drupal better and can be evaluated automatically. Leave a comment here, on twitter, or write a blog post about ideas you have for that.

Hopefully we can release those and other features in the coming months! Until then, keep rocking and contributing to the Drupal project!

Ben's blog

Turn it up - Rocking certifications

More metrics

More rockers certified

The future for Certified to Rock