Yeah, if I'm understanding it correctly it's a bit head-tilty for me. (Mind you, also eases some regret because though I saved my gathering turns, I did hatch all my nests, bond with my fams, etc already today, and at first I thought dang, missed opportunities for moar loot. And I thought it a shame I'd be brewing vistas for most of the event rather than collecting goops. And I was debating doing my own exalting rather than sending to Plague's PB.)

But aside from self-reporting quantities of items contributed for bragging rights, there doesn't seem to be a metric for encouraging individual users to interact with the site more for more chances at items - or, for that matter, even turning them in rather than just hoarding all but one of each per phase and keeping the rest for plain ol' baldwin fodder (from the item DB entry it at least looks like they'll be meltable - if not, the mats tabs of the AH is likely to get clogged with them).
However, this is the first such event on FR, so participation awards probably do make more sense to both get everyone accustomed to it and alleviate any accusations that a supposed sitewide celebration was skewed unfairly towards power users.