For the HFOSS course, we completed a Commarch assignment, basically just investigating an open source project and learning a bit about it. My group chose Fedora Badges, because I was familiar with it and it is an awesome project led by people that are already close to FOSS@RIT.

Project: Fedora Badges

IRC Channel: #fedora-infra, #fedora-apps, #fedora-badges on freenode
Code Repository: https://github.com/fedora-infra/fedbadges
Mail list archive: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/badges/
Join the list here: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/badges
Project Wiki: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-badges/wiki

Fedora Badges or Federated Badges, as it is expanding past Fedora, is a recognition system for participation and contribution in the Fedora community and to encourage users to get involved in the improvement of the Fedora Project.

The initial commit on the GitHub page was on August 1, 2012, but the Github page is not the original home of the code and some of the history was lost when it was migrated. The project is still under development and being actively committed to with some regularity.

Anybody can submit a pull request to Fedora Badges. Once a patch has been submitted it has to get a "+1" to be accepted. Basically, other contributors to the project have to peer review any of the code added to the project to confirm that it doesn't break anything, is a valid solution or addition, and meets style standards.

Ralph Bean has the most commits to Fedora Badges, and a lot of the project rests on him. Fedora Badges has really only had three contributors, although auxilary projects like Tahrir have more contributors. The same core group of people seem to contribute to them consistantly though.

Although Threebean is the main contributor to Fedora Badges I wouldn't say he is a Benevolent Dictator for Life on the project, although he may be called the lead developer. The overall style of the development of Fedora Badges is an open democracy, not a lone crusader.

This spirit is what would allow Fedora Badges to continue even if threebean was viciously mauled by a raptor. While we mourned the loss, I can only imagine how much the Fedora community would come together to continue his work, especially because they have good documentation. Similarly, if the top core developers were all hit by a bus the project would still survive. It may slow down the project, and the whole Fedora community because those involved with Fedora Badges are pretty huge contributors to Fedora as a whole, but all projects would continue on.

Tahrir is the front end of Badges, while Fedora Badges is sort of the middleman, and Datanommer and Fedmsg are the backend development. Tahrir is the instance that displays badges and users. Fedmsg is a bus that gathers all of the activity that is going on in Fedora, that is then parsed by Datanommer and fed into FedBadges to award activity.

Interest in the project has been increased, especially since its real debue at the Flock to Fedora confrence where it was a really big hit. In my opinion, it was the most important talk of the confrence, and certainly got the most people talking.

While Fedora Badges has pretty good documentation, and a great community it isn't the most welcoming to newcommers. The project relies on many other projects making absorbing the whole work flow difficult. However, the developers are very easy to reach in IRC and would be more than happy to help others out to begin contributing. New users may also begin to help on auxilary projects, like the badges themselves, and slowly move to make code contributions.

Overall, the Fedora community is awesome and working on a project like Fedora Badges would be great. The project has enough guidance and vision to move forward and not become stagnant, but is not so regimented that someone couldn't come in with a great idea and mix things up. The open community supporting the project would make it a pleasure to work on.