The community has spoken! - Fedora Badges Frontend Decision

Why did we want to discuss this?

We extended the ARC investigation for Fedora Badges to encompass our considerations about the kind of front end we would want to make use of. The treatise from the investigation can be found here.

https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/badges/discourse_integration.html

As the treatise (to a great extent) included the perspective of the Community Platform Engineering team (which happens to be one of the major stakeholders of this initiative), it was necessary to understand what the community felt about this proposal. So a discussion thread was kicked off for this conversation - which included a poll that was open for 2023-01-24T05:19:00Z2023-02-16T00:00:00Z.

A total of 8 community members were involved in the discussions and 19 community members were involved in voting for their choice of frontend implementation. I made a point to reinforce the fact that it is not only the group of people who would be involved in implementing the system who would be affected by this change but also those who would be using this service would be equally affected.

Originally, this poll was proposed to go up until 2023-04-01T00:00:00Z but we decided otherwise and closed to poll after three and half weeks of its opening. We really wanted to make sure that we do not lose the momentum and the community interest that we have garnered around the system and do our best to avoid spending more time than needed on details that add little to no value to the outcome.

What did we end up finding?

The following were the options that the people were asked to vote for.

  • OPTION A[NEEDED] We should have Discourse as the primary frontend for the Fedora Badges system.

  • OPTION B[NICE TO HAVE] We should build our own frontend while having integration with Discourse for the Fedora Badges system.

  • OPTION C[NEEDED] We should build our own frontend from the ground up for the Fedora Badges system.

The following are the results that we have received from the poll.

  • 9 voters wanted to have

    • OPTION A
    • Discourse as the primary frontend for the Fedora Badges system
    • 47% of total voters
  • 8 voters wanted to have

    • OPTION B
    • Both, a separate primary frontend and integration with Discourse for the Fedora Badges system
    • 43% of total voters
  • 2 voters wanted to have

    • OPTION C
    • Our own frontend built from the ground up for the Fedora Badges system
    • 10% of total voters

What do we take away from this poll?

As the votes for OPTION A and OPTION B are cutting really close i.e. literally one vote apart, I would really like for the stakeholder teams involved in the implementation to help decide which one of them both, we would want to go ahead with. Of course, that would mean that we would no longer be able to cater for OPTION C.

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Am I missing the decision here? As I read it, you’re still working with stakeholder teams to decide between options A and B.

@bcotton, spot on.

The one solid decision that we have here is that we are most definitely not going for option C. The choice between option A and option B is difficult to make if we do not involve the stakeholder teams but it will be either of those, that is for sure.

This thread isn’t quite a conclusion to the process yet… :wink:

We need to make a decision and commit to it. The conversation here makes me think an independent front-end would be more compelling for widening our pool of maintainers. I fear that Fedora Discussion limits our maintainer pool to a small group that we may not always be able to rely on.

An important consideration to this approach is that some of the key stakeholders (e.g. Red Hat CPE) may be able t ocommit to a fixed period of contribution (e.g. 8-12 months) and then they will have to step back. I want to broaden our maintenance pool so if a major stakeholder has to step back, we have enough engaged contributors where the maintenance side of things won’t fall into chaos when that happens.

I will jump into to reiterate my opinion is that we should have a unique front end that is built to display Fedora Badges, with integration with Discourse as a nice to have goal. I have given my thoughts in other threads, but to summarize:

  • I believe that rebuilding badges.fpo will provide the badges system a unique and Fedora branded website experience- and it is something badge artists/admins/users have wanted upgraded for a long time!
  • I believe that using Discussion as the only front end will be a second-rate badge experience, in both discover-ability and interactivity. I do believe that a more custom integration with Discussion would be a nice to have in addition to badges.fpo.
  • I would put the final decision in the hands of those building the front end. While I feel my opinions count for something, I think that those who are doing the work should enjoy building the solution and ideally create something easy to maintain moving forward. So, I will agree to and work with whatever solution the contributors building the front end decide is best.