@pnemade filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #400. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.
Hi @pnemade thank you for opening this. I also see that this is the state of badges. It has been an issue I have continually tried to improve since about 2019. I focus on the badge design side and keep an eye on Badges generally, I have a good idea of what has been done over the past few years. I’d like to add that info here for context. I will tag folks who were a part of these efforts to provide any additional context I am missing.
- Flock 2019 - I organized a Badges workshop where we had admins and designers come together. The designers focused on a new badge template design to modernize and we also ran user testing. The admins discussed what would be required to fix up the back end of badges.
- Spring/Summer of 2020 - CPE officially offloaded maintaining this app. A couple folks mentored an intern to look into the possibility of using Badgr and worked on some other things. Aiui, badgr was deemed not suitable for our needs because it was a regression in features (we couldn’t do QR codes and some other things iirc)
- Winter of 2021 - @mattdm and myself put in a request to CPE to review badges to see what needs to be done to get things working better/again. We are following up to make sure that something concrete came out of that review.
- Most recently we have found that anyone who has signed up for a Fedora account after the new FAS system was put in place is not receiving badges, which is really not great. I pinged @laxathom recently to see if he would be able to look at it, and he is interested in assisting.
- Summer of 2022 - I am co-mentoring a Badges Design intern in this upcoming round of Outreachy to work on a number of things. We also have some more design interns coming on that will be looking into the front-end of badges. Based on these things, it would be great if we could come together and fix up the backend as well!
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Hi,
I remember Flock 2019 Badges discussion. I clearly remember what happened there @riecatnor. But I think later on we saw good progress for the Fedora Badges project.
I understand the current state of Fedora Badges project but the way its been driven currently is not good. Only some areas are getting attention and rest are ignored. I am pointing only about new badges approval and its push. I can see there are some issues with this project which certainly need help of community members.
If Council thinks Fedora Badges project is in good working state then why not all badges requests are processed equally and why is there discrimination? I can see some badges have been pushed after my requested badge but my request remained ignored.
I don’t think we think that.
So if its in bad state why we are allowing badges push there?
I’m not sure I get what you’re suggesting. We have lots of things which work imperfectly, but are better than nothing.
Okay let me ask one question. My mind is tired of finding the answer that why some badges are getting pushed immediately and why not the others or the one I requested? Its not something that need review and send back to rework the badge. Its already approved and just need to be pushed.
I agree the approach to the pushing of badges is inconsistent, and that the overall state of the sub-project isn’t great. I mostly oversee the art side of things, though I’ve helped coordinate the admin side at times, it seems mostly inactive except when I press people to push things urgently. As I outlined in my original reply, I have been working to generate interest with folks to learn to push badges and work on the back end of things. In the end we need a badge admin to take charge of that, tho, not me.
Is this regarding Issue #860: Badge for Fedora 36 Internationalization test day participants - fedora-badges - Pagure.io ? After I approved the badge art I sent it to the channel for badge admins to push but my guess is it got missed. I just sent 860 to a badge admin to see if it can get pushed out asap.
One suggestion here is if you think the project needs improvement, to jump in and start working on it. We definitely need new people who are interested in making it a success.
Thanks for your suggestion. I will check if there are any document available on how to start contributing to Fedora Badges project.
But Please understand me as well. I see some badges are getting pushed and some not, then as a end user I look at it like Fedora Badges project is working fine so why no one is helping to push the badge I requested.
please note that what I am writing is not a solution to the bigger problem here.
I had similar issues with the badges where things weren’t getting pushed at the right time and had to “call a personal favor over phone calls”
Last month I learned how to do it and got access.
Now I can push badges!
I don’t want to commit long term responsibility of sysadmin-badges (especially in the current stage of only manual badges working state)… but… until we have some better steps planned (I know council is looking into it) – I can work on pushing manual badges.
I pushed ticket #860 and if you want me to sort out more badges, please let me know (I will go through the tickets tomorrow)
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I can and want to help into pushing badges. @siddharthvipul1 can you point me in the right direction to be able to do that?
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Thank you @siddharthvipul1 and @riecatnor
I also want to note here that I can see there are 19 people listed under Group fedora-badges - Pagure.io group. so when I request for badge, I look at those 19 people to help me. I consider 19 is huge number of people compared to other Fedora projects members count.
I only need help from Fedora Design and Badges team once in six months. When I will request new badge for Fedora 37 i18n testday participant, I will need help from Fedora Design team and Fedora Badges team.
As the required badge has been pushed now, this Council ticket can be closed.
Thank you all who participated in this discussion here. I really appreciate your replies and help.
I see some badges are getting pushed and some not
Can we extract stats/metrics to make it something tangible?
Like times between opening a request, getting design done, getting art approved, getting PR submitted, getting PR merged, and ± days to deadline.
Bootstrapping a data-centric culture will attract more thinkers to solve the badges problem, and will also help other projects get the best Ops practices.
In 2022 I would actually replace badges with NFTs. But that would require me to create a p2p Fedora blockchain solution for package updates first. 
I could also step in and learn “how to do it” and volunteer
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@pnemade I understand your concern, and your feedback is the latest rehash of feedback going back since at least 2018. Looking past the technology question, a significant challenge with Badges is there is no project management or organization behind how the work happens. Several people here in this thread also detailed having to “phone a friend” just to get a Badge pushed.
So, there is not an organized system behind it, so naturally, Badges are pushed randomly and sporadically. Nobody is paid (as part of their day job duties) to work on, maintain, or manage Badges despite the constant internal “hot potato” inside Red Hat about who gets to own the tech debt and project management work behind Badges. It stings a bit, but it is the current state of things. Speaking on behalf of myself, I don’t think anyone intentionally discriminates against a Badge being pushed, but sometimes I am not following the project closely and I would help where I can, when I can. I would be biased to what appeared to be top of the queue, only to myself.
To add to this, I think there is a high burnout rate for people who do this work. The tech is not exciting and the Badges dependency stack is not used in many production use cases in 2022. The 19 volunteers you identified have cycled through various phases of playing life support to Badges, and eventually, folks burn out.
I think we could use an outside perspective on this because I think the folks who love Badges already understand the situation well, but at the moment, I feel disempowered on how to improve the current state of affairs.
I appreciate where this request is coming from, and I agree that a data-driven approach can be effective—but only when a project has the resources to conduct such a data-driven audit, create recommendations, and act on them. We have gone through cycles of this over the years, but the fundamental question is a question of value and cost.
Is there value brought to the Fedora Community by Fedora Badges? If yes, how are resources allocated to this project? Who takes ownership over a possibly unending term? Who absorbs costs? Who gets paged if things break and services go down? Is migration to a newer tech stack possible, and if so, who is committed to porting features to a rewrite, testing it with users, working out a migration strategy, and deploying it out?
If there was a way a data-driven approach could empower us in the current situation, I think it would be as a communication aid to emphasize the value that Fedora Badges brings to the Fedora Community. That way, whenever someone is sitting at a negotiation table, we have the fuel needed to make a good case on why to invest more in Fedora Badges.
Okay I got it now that my feedback is not a new thing to Council members but at the same time I clearly mentioned I find issue in discrimination of badges push not about that project development and maintenance not happening. To me as a user it looks like if other badges can be pushed very fast when requested then there is absolutely no issues with the Badges project. Hence my query why the badge I requested not getting pushed?
Do you have list of phone numbers to those friends who can help me. I can certainly text them. Please help me here getting those numbers.
Being in a Open Source development for so long time now I clearly understand how it works. I never asked here that fund and recruit new people for this project. My suggestion was (maybe i missed some announcement in the past) that to find new maintainers for this project but never assumed to also pay those new maintainers. If it has happened in the past and no people stepped in then its my mistake of not having sufficient prior information about this project.
I consider there are 3 things for Badges project if you go through some of the reported tickets.
- The bug in the system where some people not getting auto-awarded badges
- the new badge request where automation rule needed
- the new badge request where manual badge awarding is needed.
Here I assumed manual badge award should be easy thing to implement as you just need to set the system to add new entry of badge and let the awarder award it. Again I will say I have no technical understanding of this project.
Thank you.
Hi @pnemade, I hope my reply did not come off as a lecture or you felt that I was discarding your feedback. It is valid feedback and you have pointed out a sore spot with Fedora Badges.
It is not the first time this feedback was given, but maybe the first time it is raised to the Council directly as a ticket. Since I am not a Council member, I only have an advisory role here in sharing historical context to this discussion, for whatever outcome is decided.
I still feel this is an effective way to help Fedora Badges as a platform and a community thrive. There is strong implicit value in Fedora Badges, which you know if you are involved in Fedora for some time. But I think we are challenged to communicate that value externally, especially to people who could help us with Badges.
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In my experience with the Fedora Badges, I find mostly they get very little front page time in the general sense. Like on start.fp.o or an occasional fedmag post (not volunteering). So like I did in the past for Fedora Magazine https://fedoramagazine.org/write-for-fedora-magazine-please/ a similar approach could be used for badges to solicit some help. Plus Fed Mag is always looking for content that is community facing.
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