Codeplex Achievement Points?
I'm a huge fan of XBox Live Achievement Points. (In fact, Siofra uses another term to describe my undying devotion to unlocking achievements in XBox games.)
If you don't play XBox 360 online, think of Achievement Points as a "currency of kudos." They're worth nothing in real-world value. Nothing. But because every game is allocated only a fixed number of points, they provide you with a metric to see how well you're doing, across all games, compared to your friends and other gamers.
I'm also a huge fan of Codeplex, although perhaps as a more modest contributor.
Codeplex is "Team Foundation Server in the sky." For open-source community projects, it offers a source repository, plus work item tracker, wiki, etc. And not just for .NET projects! The Teamprise guys just announced free (as in beer) Team Foundation Server integration for coders that live in Eclipse.
I was on the other day and realized there's something missing from CodePlex: recognition for the most prolific contributors.
I'd love to see some sort of Codeplex Achievement Points system that acknowledged contributions to shared-source projects on Codeplex.
Help me add a requested feature to my NLarge project, close a work item, and get some points.
Create a project that grows to a certain level, get even more points.
What if every project on Codeplex had a maximum of 1,000 points allocated with it, like each shipping XBox game seems to?
I haven't worked out the details. But I think there's something here. And I'm not the first person to realize that the XBox team has really nailed something with the achievement system (and neither was Scoble).
[Update: Brad Wilson from the Codeplex team, and Martin Woodward from Teamprise, both suggested I submit this as a feature request on CodePlex.