Why not "featured member" or something similar which is a bit more neutral.

This would allow you a bit more flexibility. You can then pick some members that you want to applaud, cheer or recognise their outstanding contributions to the forum, and also others that maybe did not (yet) contribute so much but do exiting work or have something interesting to say or for whatever reason.

After a while you may run out of very active members with a lot of posts or contributions, so you may want to turn to feature members for other reasons than the initally intended "recognising, praising and thanking a forum user who is doing more than his or her fair share to enrich the forum". Keeping the "title" a bit more neutral or general would make this easier...

I like your ideas. Just adding a few more adjectives to our brainstorming list:

Acclaimed, hailed, cheered, applauded, recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, honoured

We need to make sure it’s an adjective that also non-native speakers easily understand…

The noun could be:
user, member, contributor, person

Now we have various possible combinations of these adjectives and nouns.
Dropping the "of the month" is probably wise (even though I like it because it reminds me of "employee of the month" which seems to work well for many companies ).

Building on to Kris line of thinking, perhaps we could alter the title to something like:

"Recognised Forum community member"
"Forum member contribution award"
"Highlighted member"
"Appreciated forum contributor"

As the time dimension i.e. "Month" is misleading in the current wording.

Let's keep brainstorming...

I kind of agree with Florian, although it's easy to take that stance when you have been already decorated Anyways... gamification is probably something you should not overuse.

How about "Recognized forum contributor"?

Dear all,

Thanks for your feedback.
Dear Dorothee, thanks for proposing me as forum user of the month, I feel very honoured by your praise, thank you!! Maybe one day in the future, but for now I would like to let others step in the lime light first. I am a community moderator (not a "regular forum user"), a job which I immensely enjoy. And our community is growing daily in a linear fashion, see the two graphs here: forum.susana.org/forum/statistics :-)

Dear Florian, it's true, these interviews with selected people have been really interesting. But I would hesite to "downgrade" the user of the month idea to "simply" a more in-depth introduction of someone.

The original idea for "user of the month" came from me (if I recall correctly), and like I wrote in September 2013 when we started it:

This is the beginning of a series, where we will highlight a particular forum member about once every month or two.

Today we would like to give special recognition to a forum member who has enriched the forum with his excellent posts in the past....:

So it's about highlighting (with an interview) but also recognising, praising and thanking a forum user who is doing more than his or her fair share to enrich the forum...

Also, it is a little bit like those karma points that people can be given: the idea is that newcomers who don't know "who is who in the zoo", can easily get some hint who is "more respected" than others, and whose words one can maybe trust just a little bit more; people with many karma points (displayed here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/userlist), Likes received or given (see here: forum.susana.org/forum/statistics?task=2 - forum moderators not displayed in this list) and perhaps the forum user of the month recognition (with the little symbol of a wreath below his or her picture; scrol up to Florian's post to see it on the left - and it is hpyerlinked to the interview he gave).

It's true that "user or the month" is not totally precise because we recognise someone not for what they did in that month but what they have done in the past few years.

I can't think of anything better even though it's perhaps not ideal.

Or maybe:

• "Recognised forum user"
• "Commended forum user" (and leave out the "of the month")
• "Highly regarded forum contributor"
• "Champion forum user"

What do you all think? Ideas?

By the way, next week on Monday we will announce the next forum user of the month. Let's build up the suspense on who it may be!!??


Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear All

Probably in the future may also consider unknown users who visit the forum almost on daily basis to learn from these discussions but are not noted.

From what I have heard, to listen is not being passive in a discussion.In fact it very active as this person has the grip all the opinions and views of the arguments.

Congratulations to the champions.

Best regards / Mwaniki

Dear all

Thank your Florian for your comments.
I appreciate the idea of having a more “hybrid” version of the “thing” of the month.
It may be a user interview or a thread with a particularly inspiring or controversy discussion…

However, my suggestion for the user of this month is:
Elisabeth von Münch: forum.susana.org/forum/profile/userid-52

She is doing a great (and huge) job (of course together with the support of Trevor and the secretariat) to moderate this forum. This includes many things as structuring the discussions, placing posts under the “correct” topic, encouraging people to post, triggering new discussions or improving the user friendliness of the forum. This month for instance she has contributed to some major improvements (see here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories?func=v...7492&limit=1000#7492) and work is continued…. (see for instance here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/135-qu...art-in-a-little-poll). She has also played a mayor role in organizing the brand-new webinar which will be made available here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/139-in...-on-25-feb-2014#7239).
There are many more examples of what she is doing… Of course, we once aimed at not giving this “title” to “forum moderators” – but if we would adopt this “more hybrid version of a month thing”….
Thank you Elisabeth and congratulations for your excellent work!
Best regards and greetings!
Dorothee

Hi,
as one of the medal winners, I'll allow myself to comment

Actually I've got to admit to not being overly thrilled by the whole idea of "user of the month" or "most proficient person of the month". Sounds a bit pompous to me, and I also do not really believe that people are crazy to get decorated and so really are motivated by this to post much more.

However, what I really like is the idea with the interview, that from from time to time a user is introduced on a more personal and deeper level. I think this may help making "users" becoming "persons", making the whole forum a bit more personal, which is certainly a good thing for networking...

So my suggestion would be to scale down the thing a little and call it "interview of the month" or something like that.

Best wishes,
Florian

We have been very excited to recognize 3 SuSanA Users of the Month: Doreen Mbalo, Kris Makowka and Florian Klingel for their contributions to the SuSanA Forum!

But we’ve had some suggestions to change the name to something that really shows the extra-super contributions the featured users have made!

So far, we’ve had some suggestions to call it:
- Resource Person of the Month in the Field of Sanitation
- Sanitation Expert of the Month
- Most Proficient Person of the Month
- Inductions into a SuSanA Hall of Fame (just like the Country Music Hall of Fame, but would acknowledge the expertise of that person in sanitation)

What else do you suggest?
Let us know by posting below!

The SuSanA Secretariat will collect some ideas and then announce the new name on the Forum!




(Posted by Roslyn)