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