Volunteers - Goals Workflows and Badges.

Owned by Andrew Watkins
11-04-2019
3 min read

Concept document - open for discussion.

Voluntari.ly aims to build ongoing commitment from volunteers, content providers and teachers in within the system. Volunteering in schools can’t be taken lightly and there are various things that need to go right to make it a success for everyone involved.

We also don’t push people in at the deep end. We will make sure that you are ready and equipped to tackle any task put in front of you.  If you do well we want to recognise that. If there are problems we’ll ensure actionable feedback helps us improve.

So how do we track where we are at with all these things going on?  We use Goals, Workflows and Badges.

The V.ly platform supports the creation of workflows as a series of steps that are required to achieve a goal. Each goal is marked by assigning a badge to the volunteer.

Lots of things in volunteering require getting some paperwork done or multi step tasks accomplished.  For example you might need a police check completed, identity verification. Basic training in various subjects.  

Each goal is represented with a workflow and a success badge - just like the scouts. You’ll need to have some specific badges before you can do certain things.  To get some advanced badges you’ll need to have others first.

Some badges are relatively boring but necessary for admin purposes. Others represent real achievements.

To complete the workflows and get the badge you may have to:

  • Do some reading
  • Sit a test or answer questions
  • Present some documents
  • Fill in a form
  • Watch a video

You’ll also get some badges when you complete specific tasks - like the first time you help out in a classroom, or commit code to the project.  Some badges accumulate points each time you complete the task and might change colour as you get higher scores.

Things that you need to do or are being challenged to do appear as goals on your personal space.  These are the badges you don’t have yet but should start to think about.

Once you have some specific levels we might challenge you to move out of your comfort zone and try something new.

Your badges and points don’t just show how you have been giving back to the community through volunteering. They also show your own personal growth and achievements.


Discussion

This is a form of gamification and keeping score that rewards regular volunteers for their time and energy but also encourages them to return to do more. It also helps us keep track of a wide variety of bits of metadata about each person.

It also allows some scoreboarding across individuals, teams and corporations.

We can use the same underlying engine for both necessary admin steps - form completion, volunteering instances, and rewards and feedback points from classes.

Open Badges protocol

Open Badges provide a flexible way to recognize learning wherever it happens, in and out of formal education and the workplace. They can represent any achievement from simple participation to evidence-backed competency development.

By adopting the Open Badges Specification you are joining over 3,000 organizations across the world who believe in supporting a global Specification that enables individuals to capture and share the richer picture of who they are.

Benefits of issuing Open Badges:

  • They can be used to recognize any kind of achievement in any setting, across the different stages of an individual’s life.
  • They can be used to build pathways to support individuals to work towards learning goals, provide routes into employment and nurture and progress talent within oraganizations.
  • They are based on an Open Specification which enables badges to be issued and transferred across the web and other digital exchanges, across different learning providers and across borders.
  • They have already been adopted widely across a range of sectors and are being used to recognize both accredited and non-accredited learning in formal, informal and non-formal settings.
  • They provide a new way to identify talent based on competency and attitude, helping employers and educators better match individuals with non-traditional experiences to relevant opportunities.
  • Open Badges support individuals for whom the traditional education system hasn’t worked. They provide an alternative way for them to get validation for their skills and achievements.


https://openbadges.org/get-started/issuing-badges/