Requesting a Fedora Badge for FOSSCOMM 2014

So FOSSCOMM 2014 is on the way, and as a Fedora Ambassador, I have organized to make a talk with Giannis Bonatakis about fedora.next. But except for that, I also wanted to make a badge for this event, that we will award to people who will visit our booth at FOSSCOMM.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Fedora Badges system, but I like it a lot. Although some people find it totally stupid and pointless, others are very excited about it. Fedora Badges are up and running for quite some time now, and many badges are being pushed every week. Most of the badges are awarded automatically with fedmsg, while others can’t be awarded automatically and are awarded manually (our case). Manually awarded badges are easier to make, because all you need to do is to find someone to design a badge for you.

I was initially inspired from the FOSDEM 2014 badge that was rewarded to attendees. So I went to the trac system that Badges uses, and opened a ticket for a new badge idea. I prioritized to major priority, because we actually have a deadline for this (the event date).

After your badge concept is approved from the badges administrators, someone had to propose a badge and make a mockup. Within 2 weeks riecatnor started working on this badge and he proposed 2 badges, which both of them were very nice looking. The next step is to find a member from the design team and ask him to approve the badge design. After that you are all good to go!

Threebean then reached me and asked me who should be the one to award the badge, and make the posters and the QR codes. After a small chat with him in #fedora-design, I realized that in these kind of badges (for events) usually a poster is made with a QR code on it, that asks you to scan the code to get the badge. Something similar happen to fosdem, they stick a poster behind their booth. Pretty cool idea 😉

Anyway, soon afterwards threebean pushed the badge, and we are good to go! I will create a QR code the previous day that will expire the last day of the event, and make the poster.

The thing with new badges ideas is that if I hadn’t included in the ticket all the necessary info, like some logos of the event etc, it would be very hard for someone to design the badge from scratch. The designers are numbered, and there are tons of new badges ideas that require designers to design the artwork from scratch, currently in the trac, that make it difficult for these badges eventually to be pushed in the repos.