Digital Badges
This is an out-dated page which only exists for historical purposes. The Badge system has been decommissioned.
Virtual achievement badges for Bloominglabs are served up at badges.bloominglabs.org
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About the badges
These awards are based on the Open Badges initiative. This means that the badges are portable across sites that support the spec, and you are able to collect badges from various sites in a virtual "backpack".
Getting involved
There are many ways to get involved with this project:
- Earning badges! (see the Badges page for a list of currently available badges)
- Graphic design on new badges
- Coming up with new badge ideas
- Hacking on the code
- Building hooks into other apps (like a mediawiki badge displayer plugin so we can integrate badges into our main site!)
Creating new badges
Badge creation can be done by anybody, with no real requirements other than to make them meaningful (earnable) and to remember that we are a family-friendly hackerspace.
Sign in to the site and click "Create a new badge" link. You can upload a picture, give the badge a name and description, and set some terms for achievement and distribution of the badge:
- Nominations can be made by other people, or not
- Nominations can be auto-accepted
Once the badge is created, you can open the badge and award it to people by email, or create redemption codes (single-use or 1 multi-use redemption code). These codes can also be printed out with a URL and QR code. This makes awarding badges for physical-presence events a possibility.
You can find an SVG template for creating badges (in Inkscape) here, or dosman's PSD template here. There is a good youtube video showing the inkscape badge editing here.
Technical details
The badges site is hosted by cshields. The code is based on Mozilla's code for a badge-issuing site, and is open source - github.com/mozilla/badges.mozilla.org . Feel free to contribute. It is all written in Python, based on Playdoh which is an extended Django codebase.
Authentication is handled by Persona, which is a new identity management service for the web. (in other words, passwords are not stored by the site).
