Proposal: badges and achievements for volunteer contributions

Motivation

The heading says it all: (volunteer) motivation. The general idea is to have BOINC support the notion of "badges" that represent various achievements and can be assigned to a volunteer's profile. Those badges should motivate the volunteers to keep contributing as they, apart from (un-sexy) credits alone, can show off their individual contributions in a more tangible and meaningful way. The idea isn't new and projects like World Community Grid already support the assignment of achievement badges which are then displayed in the community section, e.g. as part of the forum post author details. We, the Einstein@Home and Joachim Fritsch, propose to standardise and extend this feature to all interested BOINC projects and beyond.

Note

The following represents a proposal, a basis for discussion. It's still work in progress!

Requirements

The following list is a first shot at the requirements we have in mind (subject to change and refinement):

• Origin: badges should be assignable by projects and, eventually, in a cross-project way.
• Numbers: the numbers of assigned badges shouldn't be constrained. The could be tens of badges per volunteer, so prepare to visualise those.
• Assignment: assignments should support temporary and unlimited badges.
• Visibility: badges should be visible across the whole BOINC universe, at least in managers (desktop/mobile) and the web front-end (forums/profile), eventually even on the stats sites.
• Types: badges should be represented by icons/images, supported by textual descriptions. There should also be the means to represent different levels of the same badge type (e.g. a "Continued Support" badge in "Bronze", "Silver" or "Gold")
• Assignees: badges should be assignable to users as well as teams.

Implementation ideas

Database schema

Open questions and challenges

• How to implement cross-project badges? Are stats sites (e.g. BOINCstats) the natural place to do that?

Work package assignments

• Desktop manager: Rom/Charlie?
• Android app: Joachim
• Server: David and/or E@H (TBD)
  • DB:
  • C++ bindings:
  • PHP bindings:
• Documentation