[three]Bean

Before I start, I have to plug that last week we presented on Mozilla's Open Badges community conference call. There were lots of good questions and ideas -- the whole thing went well. You can read more in Mozilla's writeup.

Ok, ok. The news from today is that I turned on 5 new badges in the Fedora Badges backend awarder. This one is my favorite from the batch:

As always, you can find the Fedora Badges people in #fedora-apps on freenode or on our swank mailing list

The latest release of tahrir (the Fedora Badges web frontend) includes a parade of optimizations. In my local tests, almost all page loads are 50 times faster.

As the number of users and badges in the system grew, performance got worse and worse. There were some so-called n+1 queries in there where page loads would scrape over the whole DB counting everyone's badges before responding.

That stuff has been removed; the badges site should be much snappier now (same goes for the the JSON API employed by Fedora Mobile).

I turned on 10 new badges in the Fedora Badges backend awarder this week.

This one's my favorite:

As always, you can find the badges people in #fedora-apps on freenode.

In case you missed it, Ricky Elrod wrote and deployed a mediawiki plugin for embedding Fedora Badges on your wiki page. Here's mine.

As Ricky wrote above, you can add:

{{ #fedorabadges: your_fas_username }}

where you want your badges to appear, and:

{{ #fedorabadgescount: your_fas_username }}

anywhere you want a count of your badges to appear.

We launched the new Fedora Badges webapp two weeks ago at Flock, the Fedora Contributor's Conference. It went over really well; the success was kind of stunning.

If you haven't yet, check out the site. The gist is that that frontend web interface is fed by a backend "badge awarder" which sits watching the fedmsg bus. As community members go about contributing to Fedora and interacting with infrastructure systems, they trigger the publication of new fedmsg messages. Upon receiving those messages, the badge awarder then makes a number of comparisons to determine if the person in question should receive this or that badge.

Since the launch, we've noticed an uptick on the fedmsg bus; there has been a definite increase in community activity in certain corners. Just check out the Fedora Tagger votes.

To generate the above chart, I wrote a little tool which you can find here. It uses the datagrepper API, about which I've written before.

Writing that gave us the crazy idea to add datagrepper stats to a zodbot command. Check out this IRC log from #fedora-apps:

threebean | .quote BOD monthly
   zodbot | BOD, bodhi -13.31% over the month preceding this one
   zodbot |      ▄▅▆▂▁▂▄▃▄▃▁▂▄▃▃█▅▆▁▄▃▃▂▂▆▄▃▄▂▃▃▅▂▁▃▄▃▅▃▂▄▅▄▂▁▁▁▆▅▄  ⤆ over month
   zodbot |      ↑ 21:01 UTC 07/28                                ↑ 21:01 UTC 08/27

FWIW, zodbot also got a .badges FAS_USER command now, too:

threebean | .badges ralph
   zodbot | ralph has unlocked 36 Fedora Badges

Lots of people have asked if they can embed their badges on their own blog or on the wiki or frontend app doesn't provide the tools directly, but we do allow you to export your badges to Mozilla's Open Badges Backpack and they provide some tools for embedding your badges elsewhere.

On our badges app, click the Export Badges button on your profile, login via Mozilla's "Persona" with your FASUSERNAME@fedoraproject.org email address, and create custom badge displays there.

Ricky Elrod whipped up this pretty sweet mediawiki plugin but there is some debate about where we should start centering user profiles. It raises an interesting point, though, that up to this point we have not had nice person-centric view of the Fedora Community before (it has always been package-centric or update-centric or something else..)

(There are still bugs to fix in the stack, but...) The big projects now are to 1) refine badge ideas and to 2) produce art for new badges.

We have an issue tracker just for new badge ideas, but take a look at this report in particular. It lists proposals which have everything they need (an idea, a name, some code to make it real) except for badge art. Can you put something together? Take a look at mizmo's design scheme for badges to get started.

Shout outs (in order of appearance) are due to rossdylan for laying the groundwork last summer, to oddshocks for lifting the web frontend to go-time status, to jenneh for UI mockups and the original badge designs, to mizmo for the badge design scheme and countless badge designs, to adamw for the badge idea submission process and for triaging the avalanche, to ryanlerch and decause for art, to those who filed new badge ideas on the issue tracker and anyone else in #fedora-apps I may have missed.

Some of us from #fedora-apps are going to be presenting on Mozilla's Open Badges Community call on September 11th. Feel free to call in and join us there if you want to talk Fedora Badges.

Lastly, I've got to apologize if I've been slow to respond or too short in my manner with anyone the past few weeks... my TODO list deficit has just gone through the roof.