Update on Fedora Badges Revamp Project

It is not every day that I get the opportunity to write about bringing back a project to life, but today, finally, happens to be one such day, and Fedora Badges happens to be one such project. It feels surreal to be finally opening up about this to folks apart from those who have been actively contributing to the project, given just how many highs and lows this initiative has seen in the past three years or so. While we have not yet reached the finishing line just yet, it is with great pleasure that I want to let you know that we are closer than ever to getting there. This post captures just what we have been up to all this time and where we plan on taking this initiative next from here on out. You have been warned, though - this post would be a long one, so I would not really blame you if an LLM tool helped you cut to the chase.

Brainstorming and prioritisation

Back in early 2019, Clement Verna and Justin Wheeler kicked off the discussion of user stories for Fedora Badges from the perspective of various user personas. Requirements from stakeholders, including but not limited to artwork designers, project maintainers, badge administrators, project contributors, codebase developers, service users and community members were accounted for. This was done to identify and resolve technical blockers that slowed down the Fedora Badges development within the community, and that would, in turn, ensure that the project continues to be actively maintained even when the Community Linux Engineering (prev. Community Platform Engineering) team is occupied with responsibilities of (relatively speaking) greater importance and higher priority.

While the Fedora Design team had been (and still is) active in churning out artworks for the badges, the technical blockers limited the activities for which badges could be awarded. This necessitated an active participation with the Fedora Project leadership to both incentivise developer contribution to the technological stack as well as encourage individual contributors to seek engagement opportunities. While the discussions seemed to have become inactive and the mentioned project board seemed to have become inaccessible, the progress made then helped shape the path that we would choose next. For the curious bunch, the recording of the user stories discussions can be found on YouTube, featuring the likes of Clement Verna, Mairin Duffy, Michal Konecny and Mohan Boddu.

How about Discourse?

Around in late 2021, Matthew Miller kicked off the discussion on whether we would want to have Fedora Badges in Fedora Discussion. While there was some interest in this Discourse feature (~35% voters), a majority of folks (~53% voters) voted against the idea. Ryan Lerch remarked that the frontend did not seem to be a maintenance problem, and instead, the badges awarding backend service would need work. He further elaborated on the required changes to the backend architecture while gathering feedback on having Discourse as the frontend for the Fedora Badges stack. One of the suggestions that we incorporated was to mirror Fedora Badges assets on Fedora Discussion, thus organically including them in the conversations on the primary communication channels of the Fedora Project.

For what it is worth, moving over to Discourse definitely seemed to be the right approach here at that time, given just how letting it do the heavy lifting on the frontend side allowed us to be able to focus solely on the badges awarding backend service. As much as this was something that we wanted to work on, the Community Linux Engineering (prev. Community Platform Engineering) team had their hands full with maintaining the Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering responsibilities. Just like the previous attempts to rejuvenate Fedora Badges, this managed to move things further (with the inclusion of assets from Fedora Badges showing up on Fedora Discussion), but here again, there was only so much possible with the limited number of hands that we had on deck at that time.

Fulfilling forward momentum

Back in mid 2022, Vipul Siddharth sent out the call for participation to maintain the Fedora Badges project on behalf of the Community Linux Engineering (prev. Community Platform Engineering) team. With Kevin Fenzi's assistance, Erol Keskin and Sandro joined in the efforts to improve the state of the codebase for the badges awarding backend service. At around that time, I was looking into its technological stack myself, so Michal Konecny and I went ahead to propose the Advanced Reconnaissance Crew report on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project. The activities around the project were finally on the rise with the talks on translations related accolades and gathering contributor testimonials, before the Fedora Badges regular meetings were scheduled by Ellen O'Carroll and Justin Wheeler.

Calls were initially planned to be fortnightly in nature from December onwards. The year closed down with Matthew Miller's proposal on accolade progression using the Badge Path feature, before 2023 began with the Fedora Badges ARC investigation and the Fedora Badges Frontend Decision. Jefferson Oliveira and Bogomil Shopov, Marie Nordin and Emma Kidney also joined. With monthly meetings, a structure for engineering and design teams was made. We started moving our repos over to the Fedora Project's GitLab namespace, thereby using the features like Kanban, Epics, Milestones, etc., to our advantage. On the side, Smera Goel and Marie Nordin also kicked off the Outreachy Mentorship project on Fedora Badges artwork design with Chris Onoja Idoko and Roland Taylor.

Yet another fall

From the start 2023, with the discussion around directory structures, slug formats, naming conventions and developer database, we had folks like Robert Wright and Onuralp Sezer join our star cast. Matthew Miller continued chipping away at unifying Fedora Badges and Fedora Discussion. Everything seemed to be progressing just right on all sides, but then we slowly started losing numbers in the second half of the year. Folks who were previously contributing actively either had to context switch temporarily or step away permanently. This had quite an impact on those who stayed back due to the accumulating work pressure. While I kept progressing with Sandro and Onuralp Sezer, it became virtually impossible to lead this besides working on the Git Forge Move Initiative and Pagure Exporter.

If you have been keeping the count, this marked the third time when the efforts seemed to have fizzled out again. It was beyond annoying that we could not get more people actively engaged (and hence, have the agency to pass the torch when needed) while we had the momentum. With the impending end of support date for Fedora Badges' host OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, approaching, Aurelien Bompard took the responsibility to port the technological stack from Pyramid to Flask, which kept the service going, but it felt horrible to have left things undone. Before we met for the last time (for a while) in June 2024, I gathered as many learnings as possible from all these endeavours so that whenever we ended up revisiting the project in the future, we would not make the same mistakes again.

Four leaf clover

While I could not make it to the Fedora Council as an elected representative, I managed to get elected to the Fedora Mindshare during the Fedora Linux 42 Release Cycle in May 2025. As contribution retention had been one of the notable issues I wanted to address during my tenure in the committee, I wanted to make the best use of my representation to push the Fedora Badges Revamp Project back on its feet. While the repositories were out in the open, I resisted the temptation of making any public announcements on Fedora Discussion as the Fedora Badges project was not the priority at the moment. That way, I could contribute to the project at the pace that suited me the best, and others could join in asynchronously too, while both they and I were busy with our respective commitments on the side.

After almost a year-long hiatus away, I decided to create a project board and throw my plans at it. Nothing serious and nothing pressuring - But something that everyone could explore around and contribute to whenever they felt like it. We had contributors like Shounak Dey, Aurelien Bompard, Xavier Lamien, and Michael Scherer rolling in gradually, with varied degrees of contribution extent. As I was mostly working on the revamp project for approximately 20% of my work hours, there was a certain peace in the experience. With almost 70 items on the project board, around 60 commits made and 90 files changed, things might actually end up working this time around. Scratch that - it will cross the finish line this time, I am sure of it, just lend me your hands with whatever you want or can to help with.

Showcase

Enough of the contextual background for now, I suppose - let's move over to some groundwork. After all, there is nothing like getting awarded the Dancing With Toshio badge during Flock To Fedora 2025, which gets you wanting to work on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project, right? Here is a walkthrough for those four of you who want this badge for yourselves from the person themselves, Toshio Kuratomi.

Exhibition

The test deployment can be found on https://badges.gridhead.net/. This is set up on a Fedora Linux 42 QEMU x86 virtual machine with 8GiB virtual RAM, 4 virtual cores and reverse proxied through Cloudflare. If things look broken there, some work is likely being done at that time on the deployment, but if it stays down for longer than a couple of hours, please reach out to me at @t0xic0der:fedora.im .

If you have signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement, you should also be able to access the administration page after logging in using your staging Fedora Accounts credentials. As the database provided here is a snapshot copy of that of the production Fedora Badges deployment on 01 December 2025, people can feel free to play around with the test deployment to see what the service is capable of.

Comparison

Here is a catalogue of images that show what the user interface looks like at the moment in the legacy deployment and what it would end up looking like down the road. Please note that the Fedora Badges Revamp Project is still in development, so these elements are not representative of the final quality. As always, we welcome all feedback, big or small, on #badges:fedoraproject.org Matrix chatroom.

Landing page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/

Collection page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/assembly

Recently page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/recently

Rankings page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/rankings/y/2025/m/11

Leaderboards page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/rankings

Identity page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/identity/t0xic0der

Userpast page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/userpast/t0xic0der

Accolade page

Can be accessed through
https://badges.gridhead.net/accolade/dancing-with-toshio

Curatorium

While a bunch of user interface elements were overhauled to offer a refreshed look and enhanced feel, it did not make sense to have some of them around anymore. Please note that the Fedora Badges Revamp Project is still in development, so these elements are not representative of the final quality. As always, we welcome all feedback, big or small, on #badges:fedoraproject.org Matrix chatroom.

Global search

Supports lookup for users and badges

Dark mode

Native support for system theming preferences

Digital vibrance

Offering custom colours for custom personalities

Streamlined administration

Easy and effective control over service

Rarities

One of the new features coming to Fedora Badges as a part of the Revamp Project is computing rarities for activated accolades. Inspired by video games, this provides users with the means to find accolades with varied rates of awarding, which, in turn, should help them find renewed avenues for contributions. Here are some glimpses of what the feature would end up looking like when implemented.

Foundational

Apart from the shiny changes, there have also been a bunch of robust changes to the foundational aspects of the Tahrir and Tahrir API projects. Please visit the GitHub repositories associated with the Fedora Badges Revamp Project in order to learn more about them. Like always, please feel free to take the projects for a spin locally, and when ready, you can contribute to the upstream in any way possible.

Contribution

If you are moved by the efforts put in by the folks since three years and/or are impressed by the aforementioned changes, now is the best time to begin contributing to the project if you have not already. We could honestly use all the help we could get and would provide the mentorship required for the contributors in ensuring that the project ends up crossing the finishing line satisfactorily.

Resources

• Fedora Badges Frontend - Fedora Infra - GitHub
• Fedora Badges Database API - Fedora Infra - GitHub
• Fedora Badges Backend Service - Fedora Infra - GitHub
• Fedora Badges Artworks - Pagure
• Fedora Badges Category - Fedora Discussion
• Fedora Badges Chatroom - Fedora Chat