I'm wondering if we could could have competitive Challenges, where one Challenge would have a face-off with another - maybe to see which one could get more books read by a certain time, or how many people could fully finish a challenge by a certain time. The reward would be bragging rights (badges? I'm not sure of that actually), and electronic confetti on the homepage for a week.
Not sure if humans should pick the faceoff partner or if it should be auto generated for a certain class of Challenge. We want to minimize the bias humans have towards meanness that the internet brings out sometimes.
Maybe there would only be one face-off per month, and people could join it or not, and choose the side they wanted to support. It could be a featured part of the community page.
There would have to be an option for Challenges to be non-competitive, as not everyone would be interested.
This is an interesting idea. I like the idea of competing against friends, but for larger challenges maybe users could be broken into teams (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, etc) that are automatically assigned? Perhaps there could even be some competitive challenges within each team such as a MVP badge or something.