This is the main page for the Fedora Badges FAD. A 2019 Badges FAD aims to increase contributions to the Fedora Badges stack.
At a glance:
- Location: Red Hat Czech, Purkyňova 111, 621 00 Brno, CZ
- Dates: January 20-22, 2018
Purpose
The purpose of the Badges FAD is accomplish the following:
- More manageable workflow
- Clean up badges not adhering to style guidelines
- New documentation for on-boarding to both design and development
- Outreachy intern to work on Fedora Badges stack
- Determining badge policy for what gets badge-ified and what doesn’t
Impact
- Mission: Increase contributions to Fedora Badges.
- Vision: Contributor engagement and participation with Fedora Badges is stagnating. A few people are doing a large amount of work. We want to focus on long-term sustainability of Fedora Badges.
Why this mission and vision?
- Continue to attract new contributors with relevant experience
- Create new badges for newer technology / areas of contribution inside Fedora
- More engagement from the existing community
- Keep a fun aspect in Badges, especially in how complex / serious ideas are playfully represented in Badges artwork
Primary goals
Primary goals are our most urgent tasks that set the minimum bar for what we want to accomplish.
More manageable workflow
- Goal: Simplify team workflow and improve response time / turnarounds on new tickets
- Success metric: Reducing number of open tickets
Some tickets need feedback from both developers and designers. Getting these people in the same room together allows us to identify blockers to either solve or move on from. This helps us clear through a backlog of over 150 tickets opened by Fedora community members. For tickets that don't require in-person discussion, the next objective is to devise more effective process to keep on top of new issues. We want to revise the existing review process and possibly adapt agile practices into our workflow. Meeting in-person gives us a unique opportunity to adopt a new system that works for "both sides of the house" – the developers / sysadmins and the designers.
New documentation for on-boarding to both design and development
- Goals:
- Reviving old content by porting it to a Fedora Docs site
- Creating new content for on-boarding and involving new contributors.
- Success metrics:
- Short-term: Number of new pages published on our existing docs page
- Long-term: Retaining more new contributors
Historically, Fedora Badges interacts with many first-time contributors, especially in the design part of our project. For some, it is an entry point to Fedora Design and contributing design skills to Fedora. It is a powerful medium to attract that audience to Fedora. However, our on-boarding story isn't great. There's no formal process to become a maintainer or reviewer. It's unclear how to contribute as a sysadmin even for those who have the interest and skill. In the FAD, working on this goal means we look at the "Badges governance" model, and how we can better involve more contributors with the maintenance of Fedora Badges. The output of this discussion is supporting documentation.
Additionally, several valuable resources, like a style guide, were completed in a 2014 OPW / Outreachy. These resources are extremely useful for designers to understand how to make a badge and use consistent style in all badges. However, after the Trac => Pagure migration, this content was not migrated to a more visible place. Surfacing this content from the archives and getting it published is helpful to avoid the issues we have today with non-compliant badge artwork being pushed.
Outreachy intern to work on Fedora Badges stack
- Goal: Plan a Winter 2019 Outreachy internship for Fedora Badges stack, preferably for UI/UX development
- Success metrics:
- Short-term: "Game plan" for where to source mentorship time and resources, define concrete goals for duration of one internship
- Long-term: Improved UI/UX around Fedora Badges
Since Fedora Badges does not receive a significant amount of paid developer time, driving a UI/UX development internship across a shared pool of mentors appears like the best option to push for innovation in this space. The bandwidth of each individual contributor to Fedora Badges is thin, but split across existing contributors and with a concrete, well-defined blueprint for the internship, we believe it is both doable and sustainable. In the spirit of healthy experimentation encouraged by the Fedora Council, we hope to use Outreachy as a "trial experience" to see if this is a more sustainable model for code contributions to Fedora Badges.
A new internship focused on UI/UX development around Fedora Badges is helpful given its wide use and popularity. People love Fedora Badges, but the user interface around them is not exciting. It's not modern or up-to-date by today's standards. Instead of drawing more people in, the interface can push people away (especially designers – we believe if we want to attract more designers to Fedora, we have to better represent good design in areas that attract more designers, like Fedora Badges). Fedora Badges is also a valuable tool to bridge new contributors to Fedora by giving them aspirations and goals to explore the Fedora ecosystem further.