Description

We have mostly finished building the system to assign our users points and badges. However, no one has yet sat down properly to evaluate the way we award these things. All of these points are nothing but digital tokens of recognition of people's efforts, but we are not getting more and more people involved so we should really figure out if the way we award points makes sense (in terms of number of points for different types of activities), and if the badges system is ready to be activated or not (we just need to think about which badges exactly to award and when).

There is an explanatory page here. This lists all the currently awarded points and existing badges. ALL of that is open to discussion. If someone were to properly sit down for this and have a good look, and come up with some suggested alternatives and/or comment on each item in there to chime in and say whether or not they feel it makes sense, that would be of much help. So, who is keen to have a go?

Our system is strongly inspired by the Stackoverflow network. It would be beneficial to have a good look at their Reputation page where they explain how and why they assign points, and their badges overview. In an ideal world, we would have similarly thorough pages on our site. We can technically set this all up, but we just need some help with the operational decision making and documentation work!

One last thing to take into account. There are two main ways in which we assign points. Firstly, we have a system with tasks (like this very same task), and these tasks are given points based on their classification. Upon completion, these points are awarded to the person completing the task. Secondly, when a user engages with our system and contributes certain things (e.g. by uploading a file or processing something) then the system will also assign them points. I think that general concept is fine. However, in some cases it leads to double points being awarded. For instance, if a "Data upload" task is created where someone says "We should have a dataset on ABC in our system for this and this reason". When someone picks up that task and completes it, they get the regular points for uploading a dataset, and then also points for marking this task as completed. So I think we must see where that issue is the case, and only award these points in one place (likely only using the auto-awarded points from the system, not the task-based points).