One thing that's been on my mind ever since the inception of the Design Initiative is some form of reputation system for design.drupal.org. If we can make this fly I'd be hugely in favor of it, and to that end I've put together a basic model of what this could look like (including an implementation), I'll get to that shortly, first I want to look briefly at what exists in Drupal ecosystem already - well, at least what I know of.
Lists of people who do stuff
In various dark corners of d.o you can find these lists of people who do stuff, well, are allowed to do stuff - which doesn't necessarily mean they do anything at all. Lists are not useful as a gauge of reputation, nice for seeing who is working on something, or who has a particular role, but apart from that not very useful. Some examples:
http://drupal.org/documentation-team
http://drupal.org/site-maintainers
http://drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git/blob_plain/refs/heads/7.x:/MAIN...
Certified to Rock
Now we're getting somewhere - a tool that actually gives each user a rating. In the complete absence of anything else this has provided us Drupalers with a way of saying - look, I did a lot of stuff and I engaged in the community. There's a good rundown here: http://certifiedtorock.com/about-certified-to-rock-for-drupal - the bit I like the most is this statement "Not only is that a good proxy for knowledge of Drupal, but it also is a gauge of how successful the person is at engaging with the Drupal project". Check out my CTR rating:
http://certifiedtorock.com/u/61393
DrupalModules.com
This site uses multiple vector five star ratings to rate modules - an by proxy module developers. The system is described here: http://drupalmodules.com/module-rating-guidelines, which is all fine and dandy if you build modules, alas I don't.
Ye ole reputation by visibility
OK, so I didn't really know what to name this - but its entirely possible to build a formidable reputation in Drupal just by being here a long time and doing a lot of stuff - in other words people just get to know your user name, see it everywhere and you get kudos for that. It certainly helps of you have some popular contrib projects and work on core - in other words you are probably a developer, but not always, although it is rare for a non-developer to conjure this type of rep.
A basic Idea for Design.Drupal.org
The way this could work is for users to earn points and badges for doing stuff. For example if you submit a node you earn some points, if you submit a comment you earn some points. Site moderators would earn points when they moderate something (as a reward for their volunteer work). We could also allow users to vote up/down on certain content types - so you could earn points from votes (could be gamed, have to careful here). What I like about the contribution + voting points is that its not only a measure of your productivity, but the perceived quality of your contributions. If you produce a lot of crap, well your rep is going to suffer. When you reach a certain number of points you get awarded a badge.
I think this could work, as long as its set it up properly and we can prevent gaming + moderate to some extent the contributions. We would need to strike the right balance of points awarded for contributions (creating nodes, comments etc) and those earned/subtracted from up/down votes.
Now, I'm not saying this is going to happen for design.drupal.org - there's a long way to go with regards to building this site and getting modules and features approved, however I think its worth discussing with designers (that's you) what you think makes for a good measure of reputation and how we might implement such a thing.