Recognizing users for their accomplishments has long been a practice in open-source communities, and now a new feature from GitLab will make it possible to publicly reward users for their GitLab activity.
GitLab explained that it has always had ways to recognize users — such as hackathon leaderboards or physical SWAG — but there was no central place that showed an overview of achievements. Now, they are introducing GitLab Achievements to better recognize individual contributions and accomplishments.
Achievements can be created based on specific criteria and then awarded to community members. They will display on the user’s GitLab profile as an avatar that will display a title and description when hovered over.
There are several different types of achievements: once and irrevocable, such as for a first contribution merged; once and revocable, such as with core team member achievements; and multiple time achievements, such as for a contributor of the month achievement. Only those with the Maintainer or Owner role for their namespace can create achievements.
“By using achievements in your organization you can start to create a culture of continuous learning and skill development. The options are limitless, from rewarding users for touching a new piece of the codebase to rewarding users that have proven to be exceptionally collaborative. Receiving an achievement can be a powerful motivator for an employee. It shows that their work is valued and recognized by their peers and supervisors. Awarding your users for obtaining a skill could lead to a more skilled workforce, which benefits both the employee and the organization,” Nick Veenhof, director of contributor success at GitLab, and Christina Lohr, senior product manager at GitLab, wrote in a blog post.
Achievements are available for all tiers of GitLab, in both SaaS and self-hosted options.
