You can earn SAP Community badges for collaborating with us on SAP documentation. 

Last week we introduced the Open Documentation Initiative which is all about collaborating on SAP documentation. We thought it would be fitting to be able to reward valuable collaboration by issuing badges, so we’ve set up a couple of new ones in a new mission category.

Collaboration missions

The new mission category is “Collaboration Missions” and there are two badges available:

There’s the “Open Documentation Initiative – Provide Feedback” badge, and the “Open Documentation Initiative – Contribute Content” badge, and they reflect the two different ways you can collaborate (read more about this in Contributing to SAP Documentation).

The “Provide Feedback” badge

This badge can be awarded for the provision of valuable feedback. Feedback provision is via the GitHub issue route, and if your feedback results in a material improvement in the documentation, the badge is awarded.

Of course, not every piece of feedback will result in change or improvement, that’s just the nature of feedback. Moreover, we don’t want to devalue the badge by automatically awarding it to everyone that raises an issue.

You will know if your feedback qualifies by the assignment of the “contribution” label to the issue you raised. This may be during the lifetime of the issue, or sometimes even after it’s been closed.

The “Contribute Content” badge

This badge can be awarded for the contribution of valuable content. Content contribution is via the GitHub pull request route, where you supply changes or additions to the documentation.

Changes or additions that are relevant and can be applied are valuable, and if your changes are applied to the documentation, the badge is awarded.

Just like in the feedback provision scenario, you will know if your changes were applied by the assignment of the “contribution” label to the pull request. If the pull request status changes from “Open” to “Merged” this is an indication that your contribution has been applied, and the “contribution” label will be automatically assigned.

Note that such changes or additions won’t immediately appear in the documentation on the SAP Help Portal – there’s a synchronisation and deployment process that happens in the background, often with human actors involved too. So please be patient!

Badge Assignment

We’re starting out by gathering badge assignment information on a weekly basis.

So if you see that a “contribution” label is assigned to your issue or pull request, it may be some days following that when the badge actually appears in your profile in SAP Community. Note that each badge is only awarded once – you won’t get multiple instances

Speaking of your SAP Community profile, you’ll be asked your SAP Community profile URL in the issue or pull request. It should look something like this:

Please look out for and respond to such a request, like Tom did here when he was helping us out with testing.

More info

You can read a bit more about how the badge award process works in Contribution Recognition in SAP Community.

And of course, don’t forget to join us tomorrow (Fri 28 May) for a one hour live stream on the Hands-on SAP Dev show, where we go through the initiative together. Join us and participate in the live chat as I walk through how the whole thing works.

The live stream starts at the following local times:

0800 BST (London)

0900 CEST (Walldorf)

1230 IST (Bengaluru)

1700 AEST (Sydney)

If you can’t make it, you can watch the replay at the same URL on YouTube whenever you have time.

Otherwise – see you tomorrow!