Survey from the Solvay Business School - Pay or Contribute ?

Your points and comments about this news

http://www.javablackbelt.com/NewsView.wwa?newsId=8884173

Are welcome in this thread.

John.

I'd like to be the first to react on this

One concern I've is about the contribution points. I would not like people to be able to buy points. As Alexey says, contribution points are about time and brain contributions, not about sweeping a credit card.
That being said, I would no see as a problem that people can pay with money to access exam instead of earning/giving contribution points, but that should not influence the amount of points in their stats.

The other question of the survey is about distant learning.
A very important aspect to me is to enable students to contribute to the course material and the course delivery.

John.

I like the idea of offering a pay option. It's useful for employers who want to do skill evaluation. At the same time, I like the idea of keeping a contribution based option for those who participate in their free time.

Regarding the payment: I think it's a good idea, either buying points (let's call them access points) or just access to particular exam. But it's important to distinguish it. I would like to know that the guy that I would like to employ, who is JBB member, not only passes exams, but also contributes

The idea of course is also great. Exams + courses + community = JavaBlackBelt as an excellent learning and certification resource.

Hello,
I had the same interview with the same nice guy (I guess) a few days ago. My current thought on this subject is:

First I spend time on jbb because I can learn things by contributing and by passing exams.

Contribution points should not be related to the sweeping-credit-card-approach in anyway. If the paid points feature is adopted, both type of points should remain separate concepts.

Typically, users will not be ready to pay until the jbb exams are fully recognized by employers, the java community or smt. Maybe it is the case?!

The case "I work 30h/day so I cannot contribute" is not a relevant argument for motivating paid points, because this argument fails as soon as the notoriety of jbb is high.

How sponsored accounts are fundamentally different from the jbb corporate edition?

Instead of sponsored accounts, maybe sponsored exams is a good move for OSS companies that want to push ahead their own technology or framework (spring, sun, redhat...)

A real issue I noticed in practice is the difficulty for junior developers to earn contribution points (without flooding jbb with poor questions). Due to their still limited view of the big picture, most of the time they are not yet able to elaborate smart questions for the jbb community. Often they only focus on java se basic questions, not more (even the extended free contribution until the green belt level seems not sufficient). Anyway, paid points are not the way to go for those enthusiastic contributors.

my2cents
JC

John, fyi the Alexey Filippov's link in the news you just posted is broken (UserViewAdmin.wwa not available for default user

)

Hi,

I am not sure what to think about the "paying mode", but certainly I would very much like to have an alternative to creating questions.
I find it difficult to be forced to be "inventive", and to be honest I do not really understand the other contribution modes.
OK, I could comment on a question when I'm taking an exam anyway - but there again, I could just end up writing something to get a contribution point.
About the third option, "taking part in moderation process", I do not understand how exactly this relates to getting points, do I get points just by voting beta questions...?

So in sum what I would like would be "systematic, predictible" ways of getting points besides authoring questions. By predictable I mean that I can tell myself "OK, so now I invest x hours and can expect around y points after that, so I can take z exams" or so...

As a background, I like taking the exams, but just for fun (no connection to employer/ career thoughts). That's why I'd like to be effective in acquiring the points, you have only so much spare time ... Perhaps an alternative to paying would be creating other "systematic" contribution modes like e.g. reviewing a bunch of questions with a fixed ratio like say "review x questions -> y points"... Perhaps you have better ideas, I just wanted to make the point about the "predictability"...

Best greetings
Sigrid

Using the auctions as means to estimate the value of the contribution point (~ US$0.45/UK£0.30/22 Rupees) these exams could be quite cheap!