CUNY Academic Commons

Posted this before seeing Boone's most recent update to ticket 157 , which points to some considerations that should be taken into account with BuddyPress plugins.

BuddyPress Links is not a ratings plugin. It's a way to share web content, sort of how many people use Twitter to share links.

BuddyPress Rate Forum Posts is fine for what it does, but I would be wary of considering it for the Commons for a few reasons. One, it's a one-trick pony: ratings for forum posts but for nothing else on the site. Two, forum posts are arguably the site content that least needs "rating", since it's largely used for internal communication by group members. Three, BPRFM's thumbs-up/thumbs-down might work well for a Q&A site or something like that, but generally it strikes me as a somewhat vapid means of assessment for the more robust content we encourage on the Commons.

My general thought on the idea of rating ("like"-ing, reviewing) on the Commons is that it introduces a sort of competitive marketplace feel to something that is very much not a competitive marketplace.

CubePoints and Achievements do similar things. Of the two, Achievements seems like a better choice, as it is developed by Paul Gibbs of the BP core team and thus has a more certain future and higher likelihood of being kept up in the future. Unlike content rating, the earning of badges and achievements is about participation and engagement, and much more appropriate for the Commons. There is no technical reason why this plugin can't be installed, but there is a huge amount of planning and conceptualization that must be done before I would feel comfortable doing so:
- Why do we want the plugin?
- What are the kinds of behavior we want to reward?
- How (and how prominently) do we want to display people's achievements on the site?

I'm particularly interested in Brian's take on these questions, as he has the most intimate knowledge of usage patterns, and will probably have some interesting thoughts on the ways in which it might make sense to prod users to greater participation.

I spent a little time looking at the features of the Achievements plugin. It might be an interesting tool for groups to use to measure member activity and create a method to figure out who the real group leaders are.

I wasn't sure if achievements could be attached to specific blog posts or forum posts, rather than any blog post or forum post. If it's the latter, than it might limit the usefulness.