New Badge Guide

To submit a new badge idea, just ​create a ticket! Please file one ticket per badge (series) - it's much easier to keep track this way. We don't mind if you create ten tickets, the more ideas the merrier! Please try and follow the guidelines below, but we really want everyone's badge ideas: we won't throw any out for not "following the rules", we'll try and help you fix them up instead. But if you do follow the guide, your badge will probably get done faster!

Policy and Process

Badges will not be pushed before meeting several requirements:

• The "concept approved" flag. Each badge requires first that a badge admin approve the concept of the badge (in consultation with other badges stakeholders). Some badge ideas, while nice, are just not appropriate or possible to implement. This is an early part in the process where we can "gate" badges. It is important to review badge concepts pro-actively and to reject impossible or inappropriate concepts before labor is spent on them. It is a shame to have designers work on 10 iterations of a badge design, only to then be told that the whole concept is rejected as impossible to implement.
• The "artwork approved" flag. Each badge requires the artwork approval of two designers - the designer who designed the badge, and a member of the design team. The badge artwork designer can come to a design team meeting, ask on the design team mailing list, or ask in #fedora-design for an artwork approval from a team member. This person will provide critique / suggest improvements to the artwork if needed. The approving team member will log into badges trac and set the ticket to artwork approved when they are satisfied with it.
• The "badge definition status" flag is a final flag that indicates that the implementation of the badge rule is ready. This may include a .yaml file for the fedbadges awarder or a cronjob script to run on some interval. If the badge is to be manually awarded, this step can be skipped.

The criteria for rejecting a badge concept is flexible, but we've come to a consensus on a few conditions over the years:

• Badge ideas must be relevant to Fedora contributions. We will not create Fedora badges for unrelated stuff.
• We will not create badges for events that occurred in the past. We did this a few times, but it opened up an impossibly large amount of work to cover all past events. By policy, now, we only create badges for events that occur in the future.

Recommended for all badge submissions

• The summary should be the name of your badge (or a simple description if you can't think of a name).
• The description should explain the criteria for granting the badge, any reasoning behind the badge you think should be explained, and anything else you think might be useful.
• The description should also include a badge description, which is the detailed description of the badge for the site: e.g. Edited at least 20 wiki pages. for the Associate Editor badge. You can leave this out if you include a badge definition file (see below).

You can check the Has a name and Has a description boxes if you included both. If you thought of multiple possible names for your badge and liked them all, please include them all - it makes it easier for the badge designers to come up with awesome art for your badge!

That's really all you need for a badge submission, but you can improve the chances of your badge being accepted quickly if you include more stuff!

Optional things you can do to help your badge move along faster

If you like, you can include an idea for the artwork for your badge in the description. If you do this, you can set the Artwork status drop-down box to Concept.

If you're handy with Inkscape or another vector editor, you might be able to provide some actual artwork for your badge. You can find the artwork for existing badges in the ​git repository, and use these as guides in creating your new badge. Once you're happy with it, attach the SVG file to the ticket, and set the Artwork status drop-down box to Proposed. Take a look at the design resources.

You can use the Badge Builder to create a badge definition file.

• Badge Name should be obvious
• Badge Description should be, too!
• Badge Creator should be your FAS user name
• Discussion URL should be the URL of your trac ticket (so you'll have to file it first before attaching the source file!)
• Image URL should be left blank for now
• Issuer ID should be fedora-project

The Trigger Topic and Criteria fields are more difficult to do - they define the rules about when the badge should be granted. You'll need to know a bit about fedmsg and Python to do them, most likely. If you think you can figure out how to do these, there's some help ​here. Otherwise, just leave these fields blank for now - that's no problem.

Once you've created your file, save it as a .yml file and attach it to your trac ticket. If you included Trigger Topic and Criteria you can set the Badge definition status dropdown to Full, needs review - otherwise, set it to Partial.

Thanks a lot! Now, do it again ;)