I was speaking about this proposal and Akash in general to a co-worker senior dev and an idea came to my head.
A Referral program
The main goal I see is to attract as many talented developers across the globe as possible. Since phase 1 goes up to 1000 deployments or developers, I think it would be a good idea to have some kind of incentive to share that program and have a way to reward those who attract talent and take the time to educate their friends or co-workers who end up building stuff on Akash. 1000 seems like a lot if we compare to the 37 developers that received 30akt through the current funding process in 2 months and that’s why I think having that referral program could boost quite significantly the results of that initiative.
How it could work
It can be fairly simple, as an example; if I refer one of my friends or co-worker and he/she gets approved to the 100$ phase 1 funding, which means he/she posted on the forum and was reviewed and accepted, I would get a certain amount of AKT(to be defined), given by the approver. Then, if that referred developer continues to progress through the phases, for each phase passed I would get a proportional reward to the phase achieved for referring a gem to the community.
This could be funded through the community pool as it promotes expanding the community and potentially accelerating the adoption.
Akash gets more adoption, referred developers get free cloud and promoters get a reward. It’s a win win win situation!
Forums Gamification (Random idea lol)
This idea brought me to the forums badges. I thing they’re a good idea because everyone likes a good dopamine hit for achieving something, but what if some of these badges/achievements had like a bounty attached to them, like referring a developer to the developer program. And what if we could add an akash address to our profile and automatically collect the reward when achieving some of these badges. They’re fun to share and could be a great promoting tool for the forums.
Thoughts
- I know these can be complicated to implement and track but if we find a good way, Akash’s community could greatly benefit from it.
- I also know there’s always going to be malicious actors if there’s an automatic way to collect rewards for achieving badges, but maybe there’s a way lol
Let me know what you think!
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@baktun14 Absolutely! Yes to both ideas!
Badges? We’ve got badges!
We nee someone to design badges for the forum. Does anyone want to take on this task? We can start rewarding active participants with badges. Every challenge, every proposal, every award, deserves a badge. Right now we have 2 “custom” badges, and I’ll propose 2 more.
Akash Founder Badge
The Akash founder badge is granted to developers who participated in the first Akash incentivized Testnet.

Sovryn Badge
The Sovryn badge has now granted to developers who submitted their work to the Sovrython Node Challenge.
Solana Badge - NEW!
This badge will be awarded to the winners of the Solana hackathon and Solana guide challenge.
Gitcoin Badge - NEW!
The Gitcoin badge will be granted to all developers who submitted their work to the Gitcoin Open Cloud Challenge and Deploy UI Challenge.

Invites
We can track invites to the forum using the invite links. To create an invite link go to Akash Community - Akash Developer Community and create a URL. You can also create individual invites for an entire mailing list.
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Hi @colin.lowenberg , I’d like to give it a shot, take inspiration from existing ones and design a bunch of new badges.
@olivekimoto - maybe you could work with @guacamole on this?
Olive is our stellar Head of Design. 
I spoke with Olive about updating our Community badges earlier this week. 
I was able to design a few today, have a look. @olivekimoto, @Adam_Akash let me know what you think! we can totally collaborate…


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Check it out @olivekimoto!
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Haha love the designs and names!
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Love them!
It’s a good way to bring participation, Keep the great ideas coming!
These are so cool @guacamole, great work ! Do you think you could try changing the dark red to our Akash red? #E30613
I love it! What do you think @Adam_Akash @colin.lowenberg ?
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Hey @olivekimoto, any update on this, are we making more of these?
Yes, would love that! Anything you’d like to make, we’d love to see it 
Thank you so much for your work thus far too! We’ve been using them!

Hey @olivekimoto , I was able to design a badge, let me know if you like the aesthetics or want more in similar theme?
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BTW, Akashwani(sanskrit) means a voice from the sky(akash)!
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This is rad. We need to make these NFT’s for the community. 
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It’ll be super cool if these badges are exclusive and gets airdropped to people who are building and growing Akash community 
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sounds amazing, I’d need a bit of collaborative advice to build more cool stuff.
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Hey Guacamole. Send me a DM and Let’s connect!
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