Before I get to the request for your ideas, I want to highlight a bug in the peer kudos experience that you may be running into.
As you may have already seen, the search in the recognition widget cannot handle spaces or special characters. We are working to fix this bug! I'll keep you posted on our progress.
In the meantime, I've found that using last names can be helpful, since last names tend to be more unique. Enter the person's first or last name, and then scroll to find the person you are looking for. This will only show you users who are also enrolled in the beta. (Note: all of our Community Leaders are enrolled in the beta.)
Another issue we are aware of: you can't see why someone has awarded you kudos. We're working to fix that ASAP as well.
We also are thinking about including other ways to give people kudos: for example on individual posts, or on their profile pages. Do you have any ideas of how we could make this work best? Where would you like to see this option? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Suggestion: If someone "likes" your content on Community, that should feed kudos. One like doesn't have to equal a kudos, of course! (To prevent abuse, etc.)
Yes, perhaps it could be stepped, so for every 5 "likes" some Kudos was awarded, perhaps even 5 Kudos? I wonder what would happen if someone had 4 likes, and then someone liked, un-liked, then liked, the post?!