Unique community rewards in lieu of an individual point system.

I am new to imzy, but quickly falling in love with it. I love this feedback community too, as the conversations always seem quick and deep and constructive. There's been posts earlier about how to spotlight or encourage active and interesting communities, or posters. There was a discussion about adding a points or karma system. I wanted to give an alternate take to this idea.

While I see the inspiration and precedent in points and badges, both are ideas focused around the user and based off real-world symbolism for rewarding individuals. You could place a badge on a person in real life for their accomplishment, and this inspired the idea of digital badges online. There's a real world idea of a person earning good karma, and this inspired a karma point system.

But imzy is focused on communities. Any reward system, then, should be inspired by real-life community rewards. For example: If there's enough people active in a community, then cool stores and restaurants will open up. Parks will be made. A community garden will break ground. A strong community will have block parties, and farmer's markets, and churches, and schools. If they last long enough, the communities will have museums and commemorative plaques and statues.

Are there ways to virtualize these ideas in imzy? To not reward individual behavior in a way that can be gamed, but to have community rewards appear organically and magically? Could you award some sort of tool that lets the community become even more solidified and unique and historic?

I thought of this because of a feature in imzy already: neighborhoods. One of the most exciting things for me when i started was the neighborhood. I liked being able to choose neighbors and, even more thrillingly, to get announcements that my community joined the neighborhood of some group I didn't know existed. The use of the word "neighborhood" adds such a charm and excitement to what's essentially a webring. It makes a smaller community feel part of a larger, uniquely emerging whole. Are there ways to further this charm in regards to chat activity, or types of content, or interesting tipping, etc?