Open Badges

Fedora Open Badges

With Fedora Badges, contributors to the Fedora project earn virtual badges for their work! The system automatically awards most badges based on Fedmsgs collected by Datanommer. Eventually, regular desktop users will earn badges, too.

• Fedora Badges in production.
• Fedora Badges in staging (the badge aggregator is turned off for staging, so no new badges will be awarded here).
• Fedora Badges rules repo.
• Fedora Badges images files exist in each individual issue on Pagure and in PNG and SVG format.
• Oddshocks Flock presentation slides on Fedora Badges (download and open index.html in your web browser)

Documentation

A considerable amount of literature exists regarding this system:

• The readmes located in the repos of the various parts of the software stack, listed below under "Submitting Code".
• The brand-new RTFD pages don't have much yet, but we're working on it!
• The Fedmsg RTFD, on the other hand, has a wealth of information on that piece of the stack.
• Blog posts by mizmo.
• Blog posts by riecatnor.
• Blog posts by mleonova.

Getting Involved

Want to know more about what we're doing here? You can join the mailing list.

Submitting Badge Ideas

You can submit and discuss ideas for potential badges on the Pagure page. In order for a badge to be accepted, it must be fully-defined via a YAML file and have associated artwork. A badge is accepted when it receives 3 +1s from members of the badges-admin group.

Community badges may be defined by a simple paragraph explaining what the badge is and what it is for. No YAML file is needed for these badges, but art still is.

Submitting Code

You can also contribute code to any part of the Badges stack:

• Fedmsg
• Datanommer
• Fedbadges
• Tahrir-API
• Tahrir

Submitting Badge Artwork

Fedora Badges is a perfect place to start if you want to help out the Fedora Design Team and the Badges project. Visit the the Pagure page and look for an issue that needs artwork. This issue holds the design resources you will need to design badges.

Types of Badges

There are three major types of badges:

• Badges which are automatically awarded by the system.
• Badges which are awarded by users via an invitation (link and/or QR code).
• Badges which are awarded manually.

There are six categories of badges:

• Content/Learning
• Community
• Development
• Quality/Testing
• Events
• Miscellaneous

Really Making Badges

Making a badge requires the following:

• Metadata.
  • A name.
  • A description.
  • An image which matches the criteria outlined in mizmo's awesome blog post.
  • An HTTP link to any old page describing criteria for the badge.
• A YAML description of the criteria for our fedmsg rules engine.
  • For examples, check out our rules repo.
  • The Fedora Badges badge builder can help you write YAML files, but it is incomplete, and so can't really help you much with the trigger and criteria parts of the file.

Infrastructure

These badges get exported to Mozilla's Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). See their frontpage for a general introduction and the README for a more technical introduction. This is good -- it means we don't lock in users' badges just to Fedora where their friends' friends will never see them.

Epoch One badge awarding is driven by the fedmsg bus. For instance, when a user comments on a bodhi update, bodhi emits a fedmsg message. A daemon sitting in our infrastructure catches that message, checks a database[1] to see if that user has ever commented on an update before. If not, then a badge is awarded to them for commenting on their first update. Badge awarding means creating an entry in a second database that User X has Badge Y.

That process of checking the fedmsg database[1] is handled by a rules engine. Rules for badges are defined in a YAML format described above.

Mozilla's OBI requires that the user authenticate with them over Persona. We do not yet have a way to push badges automatically from our DB to the OBI. A stand-in workaround is to host a webapp that request Persona authn from the Fedora user and then exports our badges to OBI over their json API. This actually works.. even if its a clumsy extra step.

Epoch Two badge awarding will be driven by user activity on their Fedora machine. When they run yum update for the first time, or open the gnome-tweak-tool for the first time, a daemon on their machine will make submissions to our infrastructure.. awarding them badges. Epoch Two is not yet well thought out.

Opting Out of Badges

By default, all FAS accounts are included in the system.

By logging in to Tahrir, users can deactivate their accounts and not earn any more badges. Their details will not be displayed anywhere on their applications. This will apply until they log back in and use the same button to reactivate their accounts.

In the future, we may implement more fine-grained control over which parts of Badges you'd like to opt-out of.

Resources

• Oddshocks badges notes for his fedbadges internship.
• Old Fedora RPG sketches and mockups.