Fedora Verified: Help Shape a New Way to Recognize Fedora Contributors

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Originally published at: Fedora Verified: Help Shape a New Way to Recognize Fedora Contributors – Fedora Community Blog

The Fedora Project is proposing a new contributor status called “Fedora Verified” to better recognize all forms of community contribution, and we need your feedback. Following the Fedora Council 2026 Strategy Summit, Fedora leadership is reflecting on how we recognize, support, and empower the people who make Fedora possible. Please read through our proposal below and share your thoughts in the Fedora Verified community survey.

As the global open source community grows, the Fedora Project needs to ensure that our systems for recognizing contributors keep pace. Historically, open source recognition has leaned heavily on easily-quantifiable systems such as git repository commits and Pull Requests. But Fedora is built on much more than just code. We want to implement a more human-centered approach that equally values all forms of contribution including mentoring, documentation, design, event organization, and community support.

To help us get there, we are proposing a new contributor status called “Fedora Verified” (Name TBD – feedback welcome!). But before we finalize this model, we need your feedback.

What is the “Fedora Verified” Status?

“Fedora Verified” is a proposed membership-driven approach for the Fedora Account System that distinguishes highly engaged, committed contributors from tens of thousands of standard registered accounts.

How is “Fedora Verified” different from a standard account? Anyone can create a new account in the Fedora Account System (FAS) to begin their journey, file bugs, or make initial contributions. A FAS account is the equivalent of a digital passport to access various Fedora-hosted applications and services for users and contributors alike. “Fedora Verified” represents the next step: a mutual commitment between the contributor and the project, recognizing a sustained track record of positive impact and adherence to our core principles as a community: the Four Foundations (Freedom, Friends, Features, First).

What are the proposed benefits? The primary motivation behind “Fedora Verified” is to build trust-based recognition that grants elevated, privileged rights within the project. Most notably, this status would determine eligibility for strategic governance activities, such as:

  • Voting in Fedora community elections.
  • Running for leadership or decision-making roles within the project (i.e., Fedora Council, FESCo, Mindshare Committee, EPEL Steering Committee).
  • (Potential, unplanned) Accessing specific shared project resources or educational opportunities (e.g., Red Hat training credits).

Proposed Baseline Metrics for Fedora Verified

To ensure fairness and transparency, we are proposing a set of baseline metrics that a contributor must meet before their request for “Fedora Verified” status goes to a human review. The proposed baseline includes:

  • Sustained Activity: Active involvement in the Fedora community for a minimum of two Fedora release cycles (i.e., sustained participation between 6-12 months at minimum).
  • Consistent Contributions: A measurable track record of contributions across any recognized area (code, documentation, design, community support, etc.) in the current and previous Fedora release cycle.
  • Good Community Standing: The contributor is in good standing in the community and does not have a history of behavior that is contradictory to the Fedora Code of Conduct.

Unanswered Questions for the Fedora Community

While we have a framework, there are several major questions we need the community to answer before we move forward. Specifically, we want to know:

  • Validation: Should applicants be approved by grassroots peer vouches, or an elected committee?
  • Fairness: Does this model truly value non-code contributions equally?
  • Progression: How strictly structured should the path to becoming “Verified” be?
  • Maintenance: Should the status expire after 12 months of inactivity?

Share Your Voice on the Proposal

We want to make sure this proposed membership model is fair, sustainable, and truly represents what our contributors value. Your feedback will directly influence how this policy is drafted and implemented.

Take the Fedora Verified Community Survey!

The survey will be open until Sunday, 5th May 2026 at 23:59 UTC. Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective, and for everything you do to make Fedora an amazing community!

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There’s one major unanswered question that I don’t see listed here: what actual, experienced problem is this solving? Because my reading of it makes it seem like a ladder pull that will slow the new contributor pipeline.

Fedora has always, in my experience, been a place where folks who show up and do work get to guide the direction of the project. Yes, it doesn’t always work quite that easily, and yes there are process and governance layers that keep it from being a direct “do-ocracy”. But the idea presented here seems like taking participation away from newcomers and reserving it for the experience contributors.

I’d much rather see a proposal that gives extra benefits to long-time contributors than to take existing privileges away from the newcomers. The only new thing is listed as “potential, unplanned” which suggests that it won’t actually happen and is just being thrown out there to make this sound better.

I’m proud of the contributions I’ve made to Fedora as both a volunteer and a (former) Red Hat employee over the last 16 years or so. If this system were in place in 2009, I’d probably have never gotten started.

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I completely share that feeling. I raised that point but never got an answer different that a “What if..?”[1][2].

  1. ↩︎

  2. ↩︎

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This proposal is seeming to try to do a lot and it feels confusing. It seems to be attempting to solve:

Who is a member: A challenge Fedora has long had is zombie groups that persist and are part of processes but that have few, if anyone, active in them. When you don’t know who a member is you can’t tell if there is really anyone in these groups. Additionally, when controversy arises some of are left to wonder about a flood of opinions and votes from people we don’t know. Are they members or people who showed up to effect change from an outside position? Having a clear membership policy can be useful.

Who can use resources: The project has finite resources and we’re in a period of having less than normal for most of open source. Being able to define who gets access to limited things, everything from compute to LWN subscriptions to theoretical free training is something you want to have in place before you’re having to make these decisions. Making it up while making these decisions is rarely a good idea.

Who is a contributor: Depending on your vantage point, Fedora contribution is up, down, or steady. Being able to define contribution and by extension who is a contributor provides information about what matters and information about the health of the project. This is not a simple “all contribution matters” in most cases, because some contributions move the project forward toward its goals and others are tangential or even orthogonal. Knowing what you would like to see contributors doing requires clear goals at the project level and a process for recognizing success in attracting it. Otherwise you risk having a lot of contribution and a project that doesn’t seem to meet the goals it has set.

This proposal doesn’t do any of these well because it seems to be trying to do them all at once. I looked at the survey and found a set of questions which made sense when read from a narrow frame but didn’t seem to be focused on shaping this proposal as much a confirming it or, possibly, proving it ineffective. It feels rushed.

Notably absent from this proposal is an alumnus concept, something that seems to always get attached to these sort of things. As someone who, despite having been an active contributor and served in governance, wouldn’t qualify as verified I noticed this. On the face of it I’m actually ok with it not being defined programmatically. Alumnus programs are hard to get right when you’re not sure what you still want from the people in them or if you’re just conferring a title as a courtesy of recognition. Almost by definition people in alumnus groups aren’t active, so denying them votes or resources makes sense. But, there are some who see the programs as a platform from which they should be allowed to speak their mind and have the valence of respect and authority. (As this post demonstrates no formal program is required to speak and any respect or authority it has is from me and my efforts not from the permission or blessing of a system.)

Not including a program for alumnus in this proposal is something I think was well done, however not saying anything about alumnus members except to sweep everyone not meeting the loosely defined qualifications of Verified into the “tens of thousands of standard registered accounts” without defining them as having value beyond being an opportunity to “begin their journey, file bugs, or make initial contributions,” is problematic. A healthy project should have many long term participants who may pulse in and out of activity and consumption and who may never be more than interested in their specific use case and not the broader effort of the project as a whole. This is good. Implying that everyone should be on a path to Verified and then need to stay on treadmill to keep that status is a mistake.

I’m not very active these days for a variety of reasons, so I won’t be prescriptive. What I suggest instead is that the council release a form goal for this proposal that goes beyond the vague, “recognize all forms of community contribution,” and defines clearly what is wanted and why. There is much more than that going on here. I also suggest you separate those concerns into clear elements, even if they are an interconnected whole. Lastly, define how you plan to start this and ensure it’s stable. Fedora has learned from decades of Ambassador and similar structures that almost no human driven decision making sustains itself.

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Here is the recent Discussion thread on the issue

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Im not sure that I feel comfortable with the survey. I think that it presuposes certain outcomes.

I particularly dont like the idea of ‘contributor tracking’

The section on that proposes evaluations or milestones, or extracting data from our messaging bus. I dont think I would have got so involved with Fedora if I knew that it was like a job where I had to succeed in certain ways.

The current system for ‘verification’ involves finding a group to participate in and joining it after an indeterminate amount of time. What’s wrong with that?

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This is the part that has some people worried, and the primary concern is around voting. With no formal eligibility restrictions we are leaving ourselves open to 4chan-style brigading, so I agree that we need to establish some sort of trust model.

That said, I agree that the metrics-driven aspect is concerning and also that any thresholds we invent are likely to be problematic. This is why I personally lean towards “web of trust” type models, though those also require nuance.

My primary concern is that “verified” (or whatever we rename it to) is too easy to bundle other things in to. If this is about voting, it should be only about voting. We’re already talking about bundling in things like RedHat credits or whatever (thus incentivizing people to game the system!) And it could very easily become effectively a barrier to participation in many ways, including fomenting elitism.

I support the proposal if it declares itself to be about voting eligibility only, and it’s explicitly not to be used for any other purpose. Otherwise I think it’s a mistake.

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The nice thing is that we already have that, but only FESCo uses it right now. The elections app has the ability to require voters to be in at least one Fedora Accounts group. Council and Mindshare can decide to enable that requirement whenever they want. Then people just need to be added to an appropriate group for the kind of contributions they make — some of those (like packaging) happen already, others might require saying “hey, can you please add me to the group?”

If the primary motivation is preventing brigading, this proposal is unnecessary because we already have a system that has worked for the community for years.

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Let me first say: I have not followed this issue closely, nor do I have time at the moment to go find and cite a bunch of sources. However, from what I’ve gathered we seem to have all parties trying to act in the project’s best interest. So this is not an attack on anyone.

I joined the project about 10 months ago. At the time, the advice was that you could join Join SIG as a fresh face with zero contributions. That satisfied CLA+1. So at least at some point in the recent past, we were “vulnerable” to having people with no vested interest in the project participating in its governance.

Again, I think this is just some misaligned assumptions, not anything malicious. But I understand why this situation has provoked the need for clarity and shared understanding around trust.

That said, I don’t think we would have added 1000 people who all showed up at the same time. So the 4chan comparison is admittedly slightly exaggerated. But we still lack the alignment around trust that I think everyone here deserves and desires, even though getting there may be messy.

(Emphasis added by me.)

In my opinion, this is exactly what matters: not accounts or groups or time, but sustained contribution. Any assessment, whether human or automated, should be purely asking, “Has this user been investing their time?”

And the thresholds should be fairly minimal, because while I might only contribute 1 hour a week, that hour might represent 90% of my personal free time. Or maybe I’m even sacrificing sleep in order to make a PR. “Level of investment” is a highly personal thing and we should tread very lightly around drawing lines which could effectively equate to, “The only people who belong here are those who don’t have kids and a day job.”

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I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Besides the open question what problems this solves, it makes an open community less open. The term “metrics” puts me off already, based on real life (work) experience with all kinds of metrics, but also the experience here on discourse: it employs certain metrics to let some users get elevated rights. And at least in some cases, I observe volume over quality, an eagerness to reply with standard text blocks, failing to read the original post properly, giving “la-la” advice. So, metrics will be “gamed”.

Yes, anyone can open a FAS account (unless there from a “banned” country). I don’t see how that has been a problem so far.

Human interactions build merits. Many people here are known for what they are doing and how they are doing it. Those not known so far should be made known, of course. And that is how people get elected and get access rights beyond those of an “ordinary” contributor.

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In Discourse (here) one can only get to TL2 without other human verification systems being active. To get to TL3, with access to the mod coordination and discussions, there is a human threshold that must be completed too. It is invisible for the casual user, but it is there.
To get to TL4, there is an extensive list of milestones that must be achieved (that new list will be uploaded very soon, after months of deliveration between all TL3 and higher having recently been completed).

So I don’t see the system on Discourse or in SIGs being gamed as things stand. Comapred to Reddit, Discord and other Linux Forums, we have a very polite, productive and inclusive community here on Discourse.

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I agree with Ben Cotton that it’s not clear what we want to solve with this. It’s also not clear to me who would decide who becomes verified (that can not be FESCo, we have enough work as is) and how we would handle all the existing accounts.

If the issue is that we found out that some people were handing group membership too leniently for an election and then taking it back, we should act on that, or restrict/review the list of groups that allow voting in elections.

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Please don’t trim my text mid-sentence when you quote it.

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I have edited the quote to include the full sentence.

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I have to say that I agree with others in this thread.

In particular, I find it problematic that a system that would result in - potentially significantly - limiting who is eligible to participate (vote and / or run) in elections is framed as “better recognize all forms of community contribution”.

I also started the survey - but given that there weren’t options to indicate “I don’t know what to answer here since I don’t even agree with the premise of this question” I closed that browser tab again, rather than having my survey responses contribute to potentially misleading results.

Being better at recognizing different kinds of contributions to the project would be great, but the proposal almost reads as if that part of it was added after trying to come up with a system to limit who is able to participate in elections to “real” contributors (whatever that means) - which feels dishonest to me.

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That’s why these surveys are dangerous: they are tautologies. Adopting your words, if anyone disagrees with the premise, they cannot answer. Therefore, if 80% of participants are actually “-1” about the premise and have no choice but to close the tab or confirm something that is not their opinion, the results will still show: 100% are “+1” agree to the set premise.

False presumptions corrupt data: depending on the perspective, the data itself can be seen as corrupted, or the group on which this data applies. But the result is always the same. Yet, in Fedora surveys, false presumptions feel like a tradition.

Creating an expressive survey is not a trivial task, but it is in Fedora mostly treated that way (at least in most surveys I have seen), and then the data is used… despite the fact that it might reflect only the opinion of a small group, even if it says 100% +1 :frowning:

Imho, this should be done by a SIG with the very expertise (if we can come up with that), or stop creating+distributing misleading data.

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