Gamerification in the Community

[Jono Bacon]

On 8 December 2014 at 18:10, Svetlana Belkin <belkinsa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Let's try Open Badges since we have Ben here to help us.

I wish it were that simple. :-)

Btw, Ubuntu Accomplishments ran out of steam for a few reasons - I got
busy, Ubuntu One was going to be shut down, other members of the team
got busy too. I don't consider the lack of Ubuntu Accomplishments in
the community as an indication that gamification won't work for
Ubuntu...we didn't get UA to a point where it was really finally
released (it never shipped in a distro by default, for example).

So, to elaborate on the Ubuntu Accomplishments project...

The project is divided into three core pieces:

 1. The Accomplishments .trophy definition files.
 2. The daemon
 3. Clients

Much of the initial work went into defining (1) which is still very
valuable. It essentially determines how a trophy is defined as well as
how it can be accomplished. Much of that is largely the same and
should work.

For (2), as Michael says, UA was heavily dependent on Ubuntu One
filesync which has now been deprecated. This could however be fairly
easily replaced with rysnc (or some other sync mechanism). For (3),
this should should all work fine if the daemon is updated (there will
be some small bits that need changing).

To do this right though (and in a convergence way), what we really
need is a standard system service for managing trophies. I believe
that if someone were to write the code for this the phone/unity team
would be very happy to consider it, but it would need to be written in
C++/QML.

While Ben has an awareness of OpenBadges, I don't believe he has the
skills to be able to build the above. Also, as far as I understand it,
OpenBadges is primarily a badge definition and issuance authority as
opposed to a platform for *detecting* when something has been
accomplished. Giving out badges is easy...it is detecting when
something meaningful has been accomplished that is the tough bit. :-)

Hope this helps, and I hope someone picks up the gauntlet...I think
this could be awesome for Ubuntu. :-)

Thanks,

    Jono