Hi Richard, I agree that levels can be used to motivate community members. Randy Farmer's "Web Reputation Systems" has a great discussion of the various important choices. Read the section here: http://bit.ly/bNDylc But beware of leaderboards for non-competitive communities. If done poorly (without expertise and continuous tweaking), the can be negative. Yours, Marc in San Jose

Dear Jacob, I like the idea of crowdsourcing, and the other entries here. However, as someone who worked at NASA in 1985, I can almost guarantee that the story is not true. I never was invited or went to the meeting. The idea of a meeting to solve a technical problman where it is "all-hands" with janitors to engineers to astronauts makes no sense and didn't happen. It's not the way NASA does things. It's a cute story though. Yours, Marc in San Jose http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcsiegel (NASA Employee 1984-89)