mikeal
commented
10 years ago A few things that would have to be done:
- The leaderboard couldn't be visible until after the first day because, for most attendees, they don't actually know the sessions that are coming up. Keeping them a surprise increases retention in the sessions and adds to the experience. However, on the second day everyone has been to all the sessions and a lot of them will be trying to "level up"
- Connecting to and pushing this data would have to have a good and fast failure path in case the network goes down. If we have connectivity issues, or even a slow network, we don't want to slow down or stop any of the workshoppers.
@substack is talking about doing a local BBS, this could maybe be integrated :)
KarbonDallas
justinabrahms
Perhaps this is a bit too ambitious, particularly given that I haven't even started my workshopper for nodeconf yet...
Workshoppers could be wired up to communicate with a local server to record progress as students successfully verify solutions to the exercises. Attendees could be given a unique key that the workshoppers prompt them for (it could save the key the first time they are asked for it by the first workshopper they use). Each time they get a pass it pings the server with details and we maintain a simple web leaderboard of progress across the conference.
Making it solid against tampering will be difficult (probably impossible). We could have workshoppers submit solutions too and we could do spot checks to make sure people aren't obviously cheating (if they cheat then they get completely struck off). Perhaps there are other ways to socially engineer honesty into the system too.
A leaderboard will add to a sense of community and also provide some incentive to keep on pushing ahead. We could maintain the leaderboard across the whole conference and then for a few weeks online after the conference too.