[ENHANCEMENT]: Badges

[JosuaKrause]

What areas do you propose needs enhancement or improvement?

There are currently two main pressing questions about the platform: 1) why should an inventor feature their work on the platform? 2) why would a visitor be interested in browsing the platform and what would they gain from doing so? Although we do have answers to those questions they might not be immediately clear to the inventor or the visitor. The goal of this proposal is to introduce gamification (in the form of badges) to make the benefits more tangible to both inventors and visitors.

Where is the current state/behavior?

Currently, the only way to add meta information that would be featured by badges is through the open ended tag system. However, this system is more suited for talking about the content in the system rather than using it to highlight articles or present achievements and milestones. In order for those to carry weight they need to be 1) feature prominently 2) be consistent across the platform and 3) can only be added by moderators.

Things, like spun-out startups or community forums could theoretically be added inside the article text but that makes it hard to find (i.e., easy to miss) and hard to know at a glance that those options are available (and almost impossible to automatically assess).

How will the proposed enhancement improve the system?

The idea is to add (highlighting, milestone, achievement) badges to pads. Some badges can be added manually by moderators and others are automatically added once a milestone is reached (more on that later). The badges are prominently featured (as round icons) in the overview (small round icons below the teaser image and title) and the article view (big round icons below the title). Each badge has a tool tip explaining its meaning and some badges have additional meta data (such as exact numbers) or outside links (by clicking on the icon) attached to them. Some badges (e.g., the ones with links and other meta info) can appear multiple times for the same article (e.g., if the project was featured in multiple external settings).

Current list of badges:	Name	Description	M or A	Meta Info	Link
Views	Counts the number of views a pad has received by outside visitors (logged in users are not counted! only organic viewers count. might need some mechanisms to prevent pumping the numbers). The badge is split into milestones (100 / 1000 / etc.) (will be implemented as separate feature)	Auto	Exact view count (or fuzzed to mitigate pumping)	-
Featured	Meant to highlight very well written articles or articles that are enticing for first time visitors to the page (can be split into multiple badges highlighting different features of the article, such as, "good read", "in depth description", or "reproducible at home")	Manual	-	-
Externally Featured	If a project was featured externally. This could be TV documentaries, news articles, etc.	Manual	Description of feature if link is not available	Link to external feature if available
Noted (name pending...)	The project was presented to the country office / government.	Manual	Details	-
Open for Funding	Indicates the project is looking for funding	Manual	Details	Potential contact or funding
Pointing to Murals	Pad showed up as card in a mural	Manual	-	Link to Mural
Funded	Indicates a project that received funding through either UN, governments, or private entities (can be one badge each).	Manual	Maybe funding amount? Might not be necessary	Link to funding announcement or donor page
Spin-Off	If the project got spun into a startup or similar	Manual	Name of company	Link to company
Community	If a project has attracted likeminded people that started a discussion forum (e.g., discord server)	Manual	Info on how to reach out / join or	link to forum (e.g., discord server)
License	If a project is protected under a certain license	Manual	-	Link to license

Badges are searchable which makes it easy to, for example, look for high quality contributions. Furthermore, badges can be used to provide statistics about projects that are hard to obtain at the moment (e.g., how many projects got external funding?)

Badges are meant as achievements and are not meant to categorize pads. This is what tags are for. Therefore, a DIY badge (for, e.g., DIY instructions) does not exist and should be handled via tags. (a DIY etc. badge might work as official categorization as opposed to open-ended tags)

Add why this is beneficial.

Inventors:

• If an inventor is asked to add their invention to the platform they can see what happened with other inventions on the platform. This builds confidence that it is worth the time to write down the idea and publish it.
• As badges get collected they can be used to show off achievements or just for own validation.
• Seeing badges on other articles / pads gives an incentive to write a well written article yourself looking forward to receiving badges as well

Visitors:

• Provide an easy starting point when first visiting the page (e.g., filter for high quality / easy to read contributions)
• Filtering for only projects that have, e.g., a startup associated to having to only read though solutions where a follow-up is possible (or ones that don't have funding or a startup if you're an entrepreneur / angel investor).
• Take something away after reading an article (oftentimes you would read an article and then think "so what?" if the article has external links it might be a good starting point to dive deeper or get engaged.

Risks

Badges introduce additional burden on the maintainers / moderators. If badges are not consistently (or fairly) be added it can cause grief or make contributors lose faith in the platform. We might be able to open up some of the badges for contributors to add themselves (e.g., community server links)

Conclusion

Badges can make interactions with the platform more desirable and might encourage contributors to try to present their work in the best light. Furthermore, if done well it would give us the ability to confidently provide statistics about the communities & follow-ups of the projects presented on the platform.

[JosuaKrause]

Steps:

1. Find out which badges are relevant -- communicate with Solutions Mappers
2. Implement the badges
3. Call to action for Solutions Mappers to go back

[JosuaKrause]

• view count separate -- on the engagement line in browse view
• view count from visitors (no log in)
• other metrics: country of origin

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