Badges Marketing Message

Audience:

• Experts in something / Subject matter experts
• First round of seeding is getting people to create Badges
• Secondary round will be prompting folks to submit projects for Badges that exist (and create their own)
• Language should be from a user-centered point of view

Value Added:

• Recognize skills you have
• Improve your projects
• Get input on things you are working on

Tagline / Quick message

• Badges are a way to recognize your skills and get useful input on your projects.--BORING
• Badges are a conversation about your projects. What are you making?
• Get recognized for what you're working on. Create a Badge or submit a Project.
• Show us what you know. Create a badge, or submit a project
• Everyone's an expert. In something.
• Build community around a project you love.

About Badges

All About Learning Projects.
At P2PU, learning happens by taking on a new project--like 3D printing (http://info.p2pu.org/2012/12/17/we-met-on-etsy-a-story-of-serendipity-and-learning/), or writing a song, or telling a story (http://info.p2pu.org/2012/10/01/the-hackathon-revamped-recs-for-mixing-hackers-storytellers/). As a learner, you'd set your sights on a new project you'd want to undertake. From there, you'd share it here to get some useful feedback (hmmmmm, tasty feedback!). We created this space for you to share your Project, and designed certain features to help you improve it. Read on to find out how.

How Badges Work.
We based our system on the 4 following design principles: iteration, feedback, improvement and mentorship. Here is how those principles play out:

• (Submit a project) Feedback. First, find a Badge that reflects what you'd like to make. After you've created your Project and you're ready for feedback, you submit your Project on that Badge's page. The more detail you add on what you're going for and what steps you've taken, the more robust feedback you'll get. From there, Experts are notified that you've submitted a project, and will head on over to take a look at your masterpiece.
• (Get feedback) Improvement. An Expert will give you qualitative feedback on your project--what is going well, what they have questions about, and what's not working. They may also give you other useful ideas, suggestions, or resources that may help you. This design is meant to help you improve your project and take it to the next level.
• (Debug, iterate, ...) Iteration. If you've mastered the skills associated with a Badge--Bravo! An Expert will award it to you. But if you're close, or stuck, or off the mark, you'll have a chance to revise your project and resubmit it to improve. Hopefully the feedback will be useful to you, and that review will travel with your project until you earned a Badge. Think about it as a portfolio with threaded comments. In addition to helping you remember what pointers an Expert gave you, your Project page will also document how you've mastered the relevant skills over time. Good stuff.
• (Teach it forward/backward) Mentorship. When you resubmit your Project, we'll let the same Expert know what you've been up to. They can check to see if you've considered their feedback, and how much your skills have improved from one version of the Project to the next. Since y'all have bonded over this first project, we'll keep both of you updated on your future learning happenings. 

Why Should I Make a Badge or Submit a Project?
Because you're curious. Because you have a side project, hobby, or interest that you'd like to get better at. Because you want to take part in an experiment in the future of learning. Because you want to meet some smart people who are interested in the same things you are. Or, because Girl Scouts never let you make your own spiffy Badge. The reasons why are endless :)

In all seriousness, the skills we need evolve fast and furiously. At P2PU, we believe learning is guided by passion, projects and people. We've created a space to connect those arenas and help learners grow. So, Badges represent learning you can feel good about.

A Project in Process
This is P2PU's third iteration of Badges since 2010, and we're quite proud of it. But we plan on making many incremental improvements in the coming months. If you have feature requests or ideas, please send them over to P2PU's Learning Lead, Vanessa Gennarelli, at vanessa@p2pu.org.

Now let's get started. Create a Badge or Submit a Project. 

Bekka's Notes
Green: 

• This is great. I love the Why Should I Make a Badge section. (PS: I think this is clear for someone who already gets it, but not for someone who comes to this new. We can make this more clear)

Yellow:

• Assuming that some of the people we're talking to are not online-y people (or are they?), we might consider adding a line or two into the How Badges Work  which says something a bit deeper about "our system"? We're experts here, so let's claim it!
• Can we be more explicit about the skills we need in the Why Make a Badge Section? Are these fast-evolving skills only for online? Or are they real world skills as well? Or both? Like "...the skills we need in a world where people work increasingly in distributed, online spaces are evolving fast and furious..."

Red

• At the risk of sounding totally pedantic - do badges represent learning, or recognition of learning? I think there is a difference, and we should be clear on which one it is. A badge is a marker of processes followed/ time spent/projects completed, but is it also the same as a grade in an exam? If so, then we need to be clear that applying for the badge will include a "testing" (in some for or another, and I don't like the word, but you know what I mean) of the learning that may or may not have taken place.