By Akashdeep Dhar in Flock To Fedora 2026 —

Session Participations - Flock To Fedora 2026

During Flock To Fedora 2026, I organized and participated in seven sessions spanning through technical workshops (for Fedora Badges and Fedora Forge), leadership discussions (for Fedora Council and Fedora Mindshare), collaboration planning and recognition initiatives (for Fedora Mentor Summit).

Session Participations - Flock To Fedora 2026
Photo by Martin Krchnacek / Unsplash

Here is the list of sessions that I participated in during Flock To Fedora 2026, which was organized from June 14th 2026 to June 16th 2026 in Prague, Czechia.

Fedora Badges Revamp Project Progress Update

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Abstract

How do you replace the engine of a moving car? Or better yet, how do you replace the heart of a living human? For decades, Fedora Badges has been a crucial partner for gamifying contributor engagement, but its ageing frontend technologies and backend infrastructure were becoming unmaintainable. This talk dives into the multi-year project to completely revamp Fedora Badges, piece by piece, while having it run just fine with sustainably equivalent feature parity. We will explore the transition from a legacy system to a modern architecture with our move from synchronous backend libraries like Flask to asynchronous backend libraries like FastAPI and from static templating systems like Jinja to progressive interface frameworks like React.

Particulars

  • Identifying technical debt and associated risks of maintaining legacy systems past their end-of-support timeline
  • Why we moved on to a modern stack centered around asynchronous processing and progressive application
  • Moving code was not hard, moving data was - Complexities and learnings of the runtime active migration procedure
  • Evolving system administration from legacy centered virtual machines to cloud native OpenShift deployments
  • Demonstration and interactions of the live deployment of Fedora Badges, with the plans for further development
  • Interactive feedback from the participants on both the backend infrastructure and frontend technologies

Takeaways

  • Strategies for tackling massive technical debt acquired through years in established open source projects
  • Real world lessons on live migration of databases and tooling using examples from Fedora Infrastructure
  • Understanding the benefits of modern stack for community tooling and onboarding community contributors
  • Balancing technical innovation with community continuity - You can revamp, but should you revamp?
  • Encouragement and retention of voluntary contributors through gamifying aspects of community activities
  • Strategies for ensuring the longevity of the project codebase by working with various community disciplines

References

Fedora Badges Revamp Project - Design and Development Workshop

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Abstract

How do you replace the engine of a moving car while simultaneously replacing its paintjob? For over a decade, Fedora Badges has been the cornerstone of gamifying contributions and engaging achievements. However, as we head into 2026, the project faces a double deficit: crippling technical debt on the backend, and a trust problem regarding undeployed modern artwork redesigns.

Our hybrid session dives into the multi year perspective of the Fedora Badges Revamp Project and the artwork design mentoring initiative. In the first half, we will explore the live migration of legacy synchronous systems to a modern application stack, on a staging environment. In the second half, we will find ourselves leveraging the Forgejo Migration to get redesigned artworks online.

This “Design To Deploy Sprint” takes advantage of the recent aggressive move away from Fedora Pagure to Fedora Forge, to finally integrate our lost modern style guidelines into the upcoming Fedora Badges revamp. Thus, emerging from our past coordination disconnects to not just move code and data, but evolve the reward system that unmistakably, establishes the Fedora Project brand.

Questions

  • Primary question: How can we simultaneously modernize the legacy Fedora Badges system for the Fedora Forge era while designing modern gamification incentives to revitalize various subprojects and SIGs?
  • Engagement question: How do we retroactively honor the modern badge artwork redesigns to restore the trust among the community designers while keeping up with the evolving requirements of the communities?

Relevance

  • Experience sharing: Understanding the user personas interacting with the Fedora Badges service platform, their happinesses and their pain points, to find targets to pursue and potentially improve.
  • Coordination healing: To openly acknowledgement the disconnection and discover ways to ensure that the efforts do not go unnoticed and time does not go sidelined due to more pressing affairs.
  • Tangible progress: To give a milestone update to the community about the engineering progress and design efforts - all while setting the community expectations on the project’s future.
  • End-to-end onboarding: To produce a verified batch of production-ready artwork and provide a hands-on experience to the attendees so that they can immediately start contributing to the design.

Methodology

  • Part 1 - The Engine (Technical walkthrough)
    • Identifying the potential risks of continually maintaining legacy systems and finding reasons to modernize the stack
    • Recognizing the complexities of the migrating data and evolving service system administration to cloud-native deployments
    • Interacting with the staging environment and discussing on balancing technical innovations with community continuity
  • Part 2 - The Paintjob (Design modernization)
    • Reviewing the legacy guidelines against the modern ones and capitalizing on the Forgejo migration for the artwork overhaul
    • Collaborating with the attendees to create/refine existing badge artworks using the modern artwork design guidelines
    • Uploading the refined badges design artwork to demonstrate the roadmap for the replacing legacy badges artwork process

Forging Fedora Project's Future With Forgejo

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Abstract

Fedora Project is undergoing significant infrastructure changes that affect everyone from distribution users to individual contributors - that is, migrating from Pagure to Forgejo as its primary Git forge for both source code and package sources. Our talk chronicles the journey from the early days of collective debating between GitLab and Forgejo with Fedora Council, through the ongoing migration of thousands of repositories with Fedora Infrastructure.

While the initiative began due to the need to move away from Pagure, it gradually evolved into one that also aimed at fixing the long-standing pain points faced with workflows. We got the opportunity to streamline the processes that made sense about a decade back, and have since then, slowly started getting in the way of contribution. This also allowed us to contribute back to the Forgejo upstream with the features that would end up benefiting all.

This workshop aims to progress along with the work that we have been up to so far with creating solutions for migrating projects from Fedora Pagure and Package Sources. Participants can take advantage of the learnings on building compatibility bridges, CI/CD workflow modernisation, granular permission models, existing toolchain integration and comprehensive documentation writing, while working on building the Fedora Forge platform.

Resources

Fedora Mentor Summit: Lunch and Learn Matching

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Abstract

Mentorship has always been a big part of what makes Fedora special. After a great response last year, we’re bringing back the Mentor–Mentee Lunch at the Fedora Mentor Summit at Flock 2026, with a small tweak. A casual lunch matching session where everyone can meet face-to-face, share stories, swap ideas, and connect over common goals.

Instructions

  • Anyone attending Flock can join.
  • Participants are grouped based on topic of interest, no pre-signup required.
  • Each day features different topics, so people can explore multiple areas across the event.
  • Need a conversation starter? We’ll have a few prompts ready to help break the ice.
  • Take a group selfie during lunch and you’ll earn a Fedora Badge as a fun keepsake.

Topics

  • Day 1 - Sunday, 14th June 2026
    • Documentation
    • Operations
    • Development
    • Marketing
  • Day 2 - Monday, 15th June 2026
    • Packaging
    • Infrastructure
    • Interpersonal Skills
    • Events
  • Day 3 - Tuesday, 16th June 2026
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Governance
    • Release Engineering
    • Design

No formal structure - just good food and good conversation with someone else who cares about growing the Fedora community.

Fedora Council Strategic Proposals

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  • Verdict: Accepted
  • Location: Plenary hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
  • Schedule:
    • 15th June 2026, 1100am - 1240pm CEST
  • Submitters:
    • Akashdeep Dhar
    • Aleksandra Fedorova
    • Aoife Moloney
    • Jef Spaleta
    • Jona Azizaj
    • Justin Wheeler
    • Miro Hroncok
    • Peter Boy
    • Petr Bokoc
  • Type:
    • Long presentation
      55 minutes
  • Themes:
    • Empowering Collaboration: Tools and Practices for Fedora's Future
    • Driving Innovation: Fedora and Emerging Technologies
  • Complexity:
    • Intermediate
      Some background knowledge/context is required
  • Resource:

Abstract

The Fedora Council would like to provide an overview of in-progress draft proposals to the community and hold a live community question and answer session to help refine the proposals further before adoption as project policy.

This proposal is an action item from the Fedora Council Strategic Summit to ensure we take advantage of Flock as a key milestone to communicate the status of strategic policy work items that were agreed to as part of the meeting.

Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session - From Conferences To Recognition

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Metadata

  • Verdict: Accepted
  • Location: Plenary hall, OREA Hotel Andel's Prague
  • Schedule:
    • 16th June 2026, 0245am - 0345pm CEST
  • Submitters:
    • Akashdeep Dhar
    • Aoife Moloney
    • Emma Kidney
    • Gregory Sutcliffe
    • Joseph Gayoso
    • Justin Wheeler
    • Luis Bazan
    • Mat H
    • Samyak Jain
  • Type:
    • Long presentation
      55 minutes
  • Themes:
    • Welcoming New Voices: Pathways for Fedora Contributors
  • Complexity:
    • Beginner
      Anyone can follow along without previous context
  • Resource:

Abstract

From getting resources for swagpacks to laying foundations for conferences, the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session creates an inclusive and structured space for attendees to meet with their representatives, discuss community health, talk engagement strategies, and identify recognition opportunities and evaluate regional growth. This session will briefly cover what the committee has been up to since the last Flock To Fedora conference, before opening up the space for curious questions and open conversations.

While focusing on surfacing challenges and exploring opportunities related to contributor experience, crossteam collaboration, event impacts and outreach effectiveness, participants will be encouraged to share perspectives from their home regions, propose improvements to the committee's processes, and identify concrete next steps that can strengthen the Fedora Project's global community over the next release cycles. Hence, this session intends to take full advantage of both the participants and attendees present at the event.

Fedora Mentor Summit: Contributor Recognition

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Abstract

Fedora is built by contributors working across many areas such as development, documentation, design, quality assurance, infrastructure, user support, mentoring, and outreach, many of which happen behind the scenes. The Fedora Contributor Recognition Program was created to recognize and reward outstanding contributions to the Fedora community. In this session, we will explain how the program works, from the open nomination process to the review and selection process carried out by experienced Fedora contributors using criteria such as impact, quality, innovation, and community engagement. We will also share lessons learned from running the program last year. The session will conclude with the announcement of this year’s winners, celebrating their work and highlighting the many ways people contribute to Fedora.