Dev8D: How many badges do you have so far?

Feb 15, 2012 by saldridge

Half way through the conferences and our attendees have quite the set of achievements and now we have a way of tracking them. Nick Jackson is one of the organisers responsible for the Dev8D badge system found over here.

Where did the idea come from?

It was whilst we were planning DevXS in Lincoln. We were looking for ways to award the little things that people do as well as the main awards.

It came from the idea of having actual stickers to give out. For example, if you were a HTML expert you’d stick a badge on yourself and people would know this. Then it developed into the much simpler system we’ve got now.

How does it work?

It’s been a working progress since the start of the conference. We’ve been adding different features as we’ve gone along. Today we added the ability to give out workshop specific badges after it was requested by one of the speakers.

Essentially, if you do something good, you get a badge. It works like Xbox or Steam achievements. Various organisers, as well as the media team, are allowed to give out a mixture of badges.

During DevXS I found that people were saying “how can I get different ones?”. It gets people doing a wide range of things at the conference just to get these little virtual electronic tokens.

What’s your favourite badge?

I really like the silly ones… things that everyone does, like forgetting power cables. That’s the Powerless badge. Another of my favourites was the Dev8D Widow(er) badge which you receive if you ‘abandoned’ your partner on Valentine’s Day to attend the conference.