Summary of March 2024 Badges Round Table

Project Discussion
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Symbol Meaning
:warning: Important
:question: Question
:exclamation: Answer
:white_check_mark: Action Item
:chair: meeting chair
:spiral_notepad: meeting notes

Attendees

March’s roundtable took place on March 20.

Announcements & News

Follow-ups

:warning: Note: Follow-up items are linked to clarify where they are coming from.

Hackfest

We will revisit this discussion once we have more clarity on the RHEL 7 EOL situation.

Marie’s Discussion Post

Marie didn’t get to it, but hasn’t forgotten. :white_frowning_face:

Main Topics

RHEL goes EOL on 30 June 2024

Justin had an internal meeting with infrastructure and other folks. The main points:

  • No one wants to see Badges go away, or give up on it as a project.
  • It’s a challenge to understand the success metrics/scope of Badges.
  • There might be a case where we can’t migrate everyone’s current badges.
  • If we can’t get interest this year, we might be looking at shutting down the service. :warning:

Main takeaway from the discussion that followed:

  • Sumantro wonders if we have a solid timeline? This is Fedora’s #1 recognition tool.
  • Justin thinks we need to get this in place by the end of this year. If we can get to Flock knowing what we will do, that would be promising. Making a decision will influence what people will submit for Flock.
  • Akash adds that fedora-messaging is the pain point. The automation piece is shaky. Someone from Community infra will explain the situation (a community blog post) and next steps. When?
  • Aurélien comments that Mozilla OpenBadges was dropped in favor of open badges. Aurélien thinks that he can figure out how to make badges work with RHEL9 before RHEL7 goes EOL. A lot of work. It’s not going to provide a refreshed system, just keeping it on life support. Long term, it takes quite a bit of maintenance to keep the system up to date. Not a lot of value in having folks manage this life support effort, because they would need to know fedora-messaging ins and outs. Aurélien agrees on the Flock timeline.
    • Is this a sure thing? Yes, probably. Outreachy is happening and plenty of other things. Will have a good idea by May if this will happen.
  • Justin points to a ticket outlining a possible approach.
    • Aurélien adds: in fedmsg there weren’t any schema, the messages were a big dictionary. For fedora-messaging there is a library that pulls out the interesting info (which goes out of sync quickly). Aurélien doesn’t plan to spend too much time on making improvements to this library/system. Quite a few messages are sent without a schema currently.
    • Sandro asks if schema can be added (analogous to creating badge rules in the current system).
      • Yes. It makes sense to write the schema and send the owner of the project a PR asking them to add it. Right now fed-badges uses fedmsg to extract the info.
  • Clear path forward:
    • Aurélien will move badges to the next source of life support, but will not address any updates/refresh aspects.
    • We also need to determine a longer term plan:
      • Before Flock we need to gather interested/invested volunteers.
      • We could present the situation at Flock.
      • We could work on it at Flock.
      • Sumantro notes that visas are a piece of the picture around Flock.
      • Justin notes that we want to make it more of a hybrid event this year. No promises about how this would work, but it’s something we want to do better on this year.
    • Do we need a Badges downtime post?
      • Maybe, maybe not. We will check in with Aurélien in May.

Flock to Fedora

  • CfP open until April 21 (about a month from now)
  • Who’s going to attend? :slightly_smiling_face:
    • Marie
    • Justin
  • Who’s hoping to attend? :crossed_fingers:
    • Sumantro (depends on budget)
    • Akash
    • Emma
    • Roland
  • Who’s likely not going to attend? :slightly_frowning_face:
    • Sandro
    • Aurélien (but would love to test hybrid)
    • Julia
    • Chris (due to visa)
Do we want to do something for Badges?
  • Maybe a hybrid workshop / hackfest light
  • Akash plans to propose a talk covering the new Badges infrastructure. If he can’t make it the content can be presented by someone else. Akash will work on an abstract. :white_check_mark:
  • Marie ponders a Badges design hackfest. This very much hinges on the future of Badges. A general design clinic together with folks from design team is also an option. Emma will check with design team wo’s going to attend Flock this year. :white_check_mark: :white_check_mark:
  • Emma could give a presentation on UI/UX if there’s something to share.
  • Additional thoughts:
    • Adding speculative sessions that aren’t sure, don’t make a lot of sense because we are blocking slots for other sessions.
    • We should get the ball rolling in the lead up to Flock. Putting the word out. We need to make the community aware of the predicament. Coordinate with infra blog post? Sandro will connect with Tomáš (@humaton) to coordinate. :white_check_mark:

Next Meeting

The next meeting will take place on Wednesday, April 17, 2024 1:00 PM.

:warning: We are in the time shifting period again. Time above is in UTC. That means it may shift for you by an hour in one direction or another. But Discours’s time/date feature should have you covered. Click on above date to see your timezone.

Open Floor

Nothing was brought up on open floor.