[Dprglist] DPRG Badging

[James LeRoy]

I was curious what the group thinks of implementing a badging system.  
With the challenges of keeping competitions interesting for advanced 
roboticists, but then the barrier being too high for new roboticists a 
badging system could be very interesting.  Unlike the competitions, 
badges can be earned anytime throughout the year.

We've discussed some of these basics in DPRG meetings so we could have 
badges like:

  * MicroController - Arduino basics.  8bit AVRs, 32bit ARM
  * Motor Control - Driving a straight line
  * Odometry - Rotating 360 degrees, driving a square.
  * Displays - Matrix displays, LCD displays
  * Sensors - Ping, IR, etc.
  * Having a robot that turns on :)
  * And many more...


But we can also issue badges for things like:

  * Entering a DPRG competition
  * Placing top three in a DPRG competition
  * Volunteering at a DPRG event
  * Making a presentation at a DPRG meeting


Mozilla has an open source badging system https://openbadges.org/ and 
there is a free WordPress plugin, 
https://wordpress.org/plugins/badgeos/,  that should make it easy to 
manage the badges on the DPRG site.

What's unique about these badges is they have data embedded in them that 
identify the person that earned it and they can have links in them that 
validate the badge.  i.e.  People can post youtube videos for verification.

Thoughts?
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