Volunteer commendation

Provide a way to recognize exceptional volunteers. At this point, we are looking for a simple, positive-feedback-only system that associates the exceptional performance with both a contact and a volunteer project.

Exceptional volunteerism is modeled as a new Activity Type "Volunteer Commendation." The source contact represents the volunteer project manager who is recognizing the volunteer, the target contact represents the recognized volunteer, and the assignee contact is not used. The activity has a custom field project_id, which is a foreign key to civicrm_volunteer_project.

We decided against modeling exceptional volunteerism in the existing Volunteer activity for the following reasons:

• having a separate activity is more extensible (e.g., the description field could be used to explain why the recognition was warranted)
• we wanted to represent the recognizer, and all our contact fields are presently in use
• recognizing exceptional volunteerism by shift rather than project seemed like overkill

Volunteers will be recognized in the Log Hours UI. A column will be added to this screen with a star icon. This interface is not built in backbone, so to avoid re-engineering it, we'll add a listener that, when clicked:

• sends an AJAX request to the server to create/delete the activity
• toggles all the stars for that contact in the project (recognition is by project, not shift)