Flock to Fedora 2026

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

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 Moves Towards Forgejo - Fedora Magazine https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-unified-decision/
• Announcing the Soft Launch of Fedora Forge - Fedora Community Blog https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/announcing-the-soft-launch-of-fedora-forge/
• Forging Fedora’s Future with Forgejo - Fedora Community Blog https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/forging-fedoras-future-with-forgejo/
• Git Forge Initiative - Fedora Council - Fedora Wiki https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initiatives/Git_Forge_Initiative_2025
• Dist Git Move - Advanced Reconnaissance Crew - Read The Docs https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dist-git-move/index.html
• Dist Git Comparison - Advanced Reconnaissance Crew - Read The Docs https://fedora-arc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dist-git-comparison/index.html

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.

Here’s how it works this year:
* 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 by day:

Day 1 (Sunday, June 14)
* Documentation
* Operations
* Development
* Marketing

Day 2 (Monday, June 15)
* Packaging
* Infrastructure
* Interpersonal Skills
* Events

Day 3 (Tuesday, June 16)
* 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.

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

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.

Here’s how it works this year:
* 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 by day:

Day 1 (Sunday, June 14)
* Documentation
* Operations
* Development
* Marketing

Day 2 (Monday, June 15)
* Packaging
* Infrastructure
* Interpersonal Skills
* Events

Day 3 (Tuesday, June 16)
* 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.

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.

Here’s how it works this year:
* 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 by day:

Day 1 (Sunday, June 14)
* Documentation
* Operations
* Development
* Marketing

Day 2 (Monday, June 15)
* Packaging
* Infrastructure
* Interpersonal Skills
* Events

Day 3 (Tuesday, June 16)
* 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.

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 is built by contributors working across many areas such as development, documentation, design, QA, 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.