To talk about implementation, one of the key issues is user identity
across multiple projects. You could do it with a mixture of cookies, ip
and existing user accounts (twfy, wdtk etc.) that the federated site
pushes to the achievement site when it awards a badge, which then
attempts to correlate this with an existing user identity. Users could
come along after the fact (to keep barriers as low as possible) and tie
an account (that perhaps is currently only tied to an ip address) to a
proper email address. A site giving a badge would just be a signed POST
to some api, a site wouldn't even need to pre-register a badge before
awarding it (in Democracy Club, badges are just a format string and an
associated optional integer, which is incremented every time the user is
re-awarded the same badge - so you can stack badges together like
"Uploaded 6 leaflets").
User experience-wise what I imagine is something like an extension of
the existing mySociety bar (perhaps rebrandable for non-mysoc projects?
edmund suggested `volunteer army' for our election crowdsourcing
projects, though that at .com/.net/.org for that is taken) that pops up
toaster notifications when you do things, such as sending a message to
your representative. It'd then prod you to go to the achievements site
to see what you've done, to see what other projects you can get
achievements from, and to manage your identity.
One problem with this is that it's kind of trying to highjack the
post-action workflow that sites already have, such as filling in a
survey after you've sent a message, or get pushed onto a new site that
needs promoting, though with some thought it could augment these as well
(after awarding a badge, a site could suggest the next badge a user
could get, e.g. filling in the survey or registering at a new site).
In some ways it feels like the existing DC codebase could already do
this, but it's generally attempting to define what a task is in a
central managed-campaign manner (and over-complex for what we're trying
to do here), rather than leaving it to federated sites to feed tasks up
the chain in the form of achievements.
Most important thing I'd think is loose-as-possible coupling between
sites (adding a site to it should require no action on part of the
achievement site admins, perhaps some basic form on the site to get a
secret key) and some solid way to handle cross-site identity that isn't
too much fuss to users.
Tim
On 18/08/10 15:24, Francis Davey wrote:
On 10 August 2010 13:51, Ben Campbell<[email protected]> wrote:
All very silly, of course, but then so are most facebook games... (eg
http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml ;-)
Its surprising how effective this kind of thing can be. The enormously
varied number of badges on the stackoverflow/stackexchange system
somehow inspires me to try to do more. Incentives can be as simple as
that.
Key points include the fact that one starts earning badges easily at
the start and there are plenty which can be earned by making a little
effort.
Stackexchange has started making them more cross-project (they
obviously started as just stackoverflow of course). A generic "civics
exchange" badges system, either across MS sites, or across MS and
associated sites would almost certainly pull in more people from one
site to another and might well encourage people to do more.
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