Very good questions. All of these concepts are connected -- some directly, some indirectly. The overall premise is to provide a better way to identify (and raise the visibility of) those who provide quality information. Currently, the system we are using identifies quantity more than quality. The former does contribute (some) to the latter, but the two are definitely not equal in terms of metrics. So...:
+ Gamification is something that started in the gaming industry (hence the name), but applies in many other areas, too, including that for our business. Wikipedia provides a fairly comprehensive dive into that -- see en.wikipedia.org/.../Gamification for that.
+ Badges demonstrate status and progress through visual presentation. In our communities, we are looking to do that through either the avatar or member name fly-over (currently it is manual and pretty static, our vision is to make that more dynamic in nature).
+ Reputation is a quality metric that contributes to the above.
+ Leaderboards will show things like who has the most contributions, who has the most replies, who has the most likes/kudos, who has the most replies to contributions, etc.
+ Ideation is something that adds challenge posing and idea generation, rating, commenting, voting, and triage to any system (i.e. communities). We are currently using that in a few areas -- it was previously "documented" in communities.bentley.com/.../introducing-community-ideas.aspx -- and are working on a plan to integrate that into our product planning system.
+ Calendar integration is mainly to identify certain upcoming events that are relevant to the community they will appear in.
We are still working some of these things out, but do plan to provide more details on them as we move forward. We just wanted to provide a "head's up" on things that we will be integrating into the communities platform over time.