wowzers this topic provoked a lot of discussion! It’s always good when something as seemingly innocuous as badges unearths other stuff.
Re. badges overall goodness. It depends on what you compare it with really, Richard is right in that it’s not deeply enriching in a way that, say…being directly thanked by a person for doing X thing biut my take on it is everyone gets their dopamine hits in different ways, for some folks badges are those positive affirmations and goals (especially good for folks that may struggle to set their own achievable goals) and could also be a means to which you can offer a route to learning a new way of doing things e.g. Badge for ‘discovering’ a thing rather than doing X amount of thing so like, 'You found a new project that does X and you like X! vs You contributed 555 PRs and that is what we decide is good = badge! As long as you structure these things in a considerate way that is not elitist it can be good and not competitive. I do agree that that might be limited by Discourses current functionality. I would want folks to be able to turn badges on/off which may not be possible.
Gamify is a good book on this (but take with appropriate amount of salt please, https://www.amazon.com/Gamify-Gamification-Motivates-People-Extraordinary/dp/1937134857
@jwf re reaching out to Open Source Design - I think whether it’s too early or not depends more on capacity of who facilitates this need more than timing. Getting design input is good early because it helps make informed decisions on what to offer up to users and why (as is this discussion too, which is awesome) You might frame it like: "We’re looking at engaging with people on discourse in X, Y and Z ways and badges that are branded and visually ‘appealing’ is one way that we’ve thought about that but are there other ways we can do good service design for the sustain community (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/service-design-101/ and https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-principles-of-service-design-thinking-building-better-services for reasonably good explanations of service design).
Agreed with @allman that a website should primarily serve its users but it should also enable the ‘staff’ to meet their objectives by allowing those users to do what they want and often, without access to usertesting, usability studies and user research the ‘staff’ are reasonably good proxies for making design hypothesis re. improvements to a site…also, personal opinion re. designers role should also include guiding and helping ‘staff’ of a website/service to adopt a more user centric thinking and you don’t do that by excluding ‘staff’ from the process of informed opinion forming.
eep. big paragraph.
Tl:dr: If you want to have a face to face about design related stuff obvs you have Memo and the team who are amazing but also always happy to contribute and participate! 
