Webdev:Badger

Badger is an effort to build an Open Source web application that facilitates the creation and gifting of badges representing community gratitude for a variety of achievements and accomplishments.

Overview / Goals

User:LesOrchard wrote a long proposal about Badger, including some thought about badges as social objects and possible benefits & use cases.

But, in short, Badger aims to support these features:

• Artifacts of gratitude—i.e. badges—as social objects to exchanged, displayed, and discussed.
• Showcasing community values through the things we collectively celebrate.
• Public recognition of community members and their valued contributions.
• Transparent, open processes for participating in creating, awarding, discussing, and evaluating badges.
• Collaboration on badge creation through a "Help Wanted" system that presents minimal overhead for coordination and offers a playful space for creative contribution.
• Mobile device support for awarding badges on the spot and expressing public gratitude in person.
• Rule-based awards triggered by conditions detected on the web in the tools we use for work every day.

Discussion

• bug 584148 - Filed a project bug using the webdev initiation form
• Created a Google Group, at least for now:
  • http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-badger
• Hanging out in IRC here:
  • irc://irc.mozilla.org/badger

Hosting / Demo

• Current state of the build in Hudson
• There's a demo installation running on User:LesOrchard's hobby server at badger.decafbad.com
  • This may or may not be broken right at any particular time.
  • All data may disappear periodically.

Source Code

• Badger may currently be found on GitHub.

See Also

• BravoNation
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars
• http://creative.mozilla.org/badges/
• http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Badge (via http://twitter.com/chrismessina/)
• http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputation-system

Badge ideas

Badger is not quite in decent enough shape to handle the firepower of a fully operational creative community.

For now, please share ideas with the discussion group, and soon we can shift onto the app itself.

Blue sky / Brainstorming

Until / unless a better idea capture tool becomes attached to this project, feel free to add random ideas and feature requests below:

API / federation

• Using Activity Streams in Atom feeds to expose badge activity.
• Using Activity Stream schemas in JSON with callback for badges & etc
• OAuth / valet key accessible API
  • For authenticated fetch of badge set
  • Nominating / awarding badges
    • For use in building external trigger scripts (eg. 1000th bugzilla bug closed)
    • Integration with other sites in general

Misc

• see also: TODO, future
• Different "categories" of badge: Badges, Stripes, Stars, etc.
• Geolocation-triggered badges: Walk into the MV office, get a badge! At the Whistler Fairmont during Summit? Get a badge. Maybe part of a Badger mobile app?
• Group-organized badges: Creative Collective-bestowed badges, Labs badges, etc.
• badger.mozilla.com/[username]/sash/ for displaying a set of earned badges
• A way to do HTML5 game achievements via the API -- this would be more for a separate Badger instance than the Mozilla Contributor one, but could be super fun.
• It made me think that perhaps a future feature for Badger could be "self-bestowed" badges that a user can claim to augment his/her overall identity. For example, I'd claim: Canadian, New Brunswicker, Gamer, Photographer, Avid Reader or somesuch. These could be a different style or category of badge, that could be pulled from the API separately for display, etc etc.
• Claimable-via-the-web badges. For example, we could put a "Claim your Firefox Nightlies Tester Badge!" on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/prerelease.html -- Anyone who grabs a nightly will see that as their first-run page and could click-to-claim a badge and become part of the Mozilla Community without any intervention from anyone.