Motivational Effects of Badge Systems on Participation in Stack Exchange Social Q&A Online Community

Open, online social question and answer sites (SQAs) have captured the public attention in recent years. As SQAs become increasingly popular knowledge sharing platforms, issues about how open online community systems will evolve are becoming vital to our understanding of these systems. In this paper, we outline how an SQA site functions as a social learning community. The success of an SQA site depends not only on effectively organizing and delivering information, but also on whether it can attract participants and motivate them to contribute. We present early work investigating the effect of badges on users’ participation in an online SQAs community, Stack Exchange. This research-in-progress paper highlights factors that help users develop into literate and productive community contributors in social platforms and considers the design implications of these observations