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I think that nominees that positively participate in the election process should be awarded a badge for their effort. I suggest the following:

  • A silver badge for anyone who received [nn] amount of votes in the primary
  • A gold badge for anyone who made it to the election phase, but did not win.

It just seems like the 'right thing to do (TM)' to reward people who took additional time to be of service to the community. All nominees open themselves up to be judged by their peers, especially during the nomination and primary phase.

This could also encourage people who might not have 20k+ reputation to run next year and hang in until the final election even if the primary results seemed gloomy.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a good name for either badge. Civic Minded came to mind for the silver badge, Endurance came to mind for the gold one.

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    Let's not have more Sarah Palins
    – random
    Feb 3, 2011 at 16:56
  • @random - no baby seals were put in peril during the election, as far as I know.
    – Tim Post
    Feb 3, 2011 at 17:00
  • As a naming suggestion, I'm guessing "Also ran" might not have quite the right positive spin? ;-)
    – John Parker
    Feb 3, 2011 at 17:02
  • I would like to vote like this!
    – Trufa
    Feb 3, 2011 at 18:25

2 Answers 2

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Shouldn't badges be used to promote desired behavior? I don't think there needs to be an incentive to cause more people to nominate themselves for being a moderator candidate or for getting people out to vote for them.

In fact, wouldn't you want to drive away people that weren't serious about being a moderator? As it was, you had people that appeared to nominate themselves because they thought being a moderator would be a great accomplishment on top of the reputation they'd already gained. Being a moderator is not a prize, it's a set of additional responsibilities that the community has entrusted you with.

Speaking for myself, I had a lot of fun by taking part in the process, and learned something from it. The fact that some people voted for me was even better. I don't need a badge to make this feel worthwhile to me.

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  • Nice point! but, you could argue that any badge could encourage bad behavior (think of critic, random down-votes etc) and @Tim proposed that it was over certain number of votes, so this should avoid giving this badge to people just fooling around. Right?
    – Trufa
    Feb 3, 2011 at 18:29
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    @Trufa: It just seems to me that the process is attractive enough by itself (witness the number of nominations) and doesn't need a dedicated badge to promote it. The only reason I could think for having a badge for racking up a certain number of votes would be to identify candidates in the next election that didn't quite make it in this one, but who are running again.
    – Brad Larson
    Feb 3, 2011 at 18:43
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Running in any election has risks and rewards. If you win, that is a nice reward, but the risk is spending time/effort and losing. I don't think any reward is owed to people who lost in the election. Participation should be encouraged, but everyone knows going in, that there is a good chance they will walk away with nothing.

Therefore I recommend against badges for the losers.

(Disclaimer, I know this answer might sound harsh, but I am truly proud that people did run in the election knowing that peer comments could have been rough)

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    "but I am truly proud that people did run in the election knowing that peer comments could have been rough" - I was expecting a badge. :P
    – jjnguy
    Feb 3, 2011 at 18:34

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