how to correlate users to automatically issue badges

[ryzokuken]

While thinking stuff about the automation workflow for issuing badges, I came upon this:

Because we're using GitHub's webhooks to trigger the badge issuance methods, we'd have access to the GitHub details of the user (here: contributor) under consideration. However, the badgr API will need the details from their badgr which may (and probably will) be different.

In order to correlate users, we would have a few options, a subset of which is:

1. Make a database mapping our contributors' GitHub credentials to their Badgr credentials and use it while issuing badges.

2. Automatically issue a badge to a badgr user with the same username (thus forcing username consistency upon contributors) [BAD]

3. Automatically issue a badge to a badgr user with the same email (thus forcing email consistency upon contributors) [RELATIVELY LESS BAD]

@nodejs/badges and others, please vote on these and if possible, propose better ones.

[amiller-gh]

Are you sure we need each recipient to have an active Badgr account to issue badges? It seems like /v2/badgeclasses/{entity_id}/issue will allow you to pass any email address, regardless of if its associated with a Badgr account. The recipient data model appears to be:

interface {
  // Either the hash of the identity or the plaintext value
  identity: string;

  // Type of identifier used to identify recipientEnum:
  type:  "email" | "openBadgeId" | "telephone" | "url";

  // Whether or not the identity value is hashed.
  hashed: boolean;

  // The plaintext identity
  plaintextIdentity: string;
}

I'm not entirely sure what plaintextIdentity means, but the data model leads me to believe we can pass it any email and it should notify that person that they have a badge to claim.

I have a hunch that people won't already have Badgr accounts and they'll be making them to claim these badges 😉 So I vote for #3!

[ryzokuken]

@amiller-gh they don't need to have a badgr account, but if they do, and it has different credentials (associated email) then #1 works best.

That said, I'm in favor of #3 as well, because it is much more foolproof than #2 while still involving us to do much less work than #1.

[Tiriel]

Not sure creating a whole database is a good idea either. It would need much maintenance, associated platform issues and cost.

I'd say option 3 as well!