Proposal for Tangible Contributor Recognition Awards under Fedora Mindshare Recognition Service

This is a follow-up to the discussion we had during the last Fedora Mindshare fortnightly meeting of the year 2025. Not to be confused with the Fedora Contributor Recognition Awards programme, which the Fedora Mentor Summit organisers run specifically for the mentoring aspect of the Fedora Project community, this one is for the activities that contributed to the Fedora Linux releases. These tasks might include, but are not limited to, development, testing, maintenance, documentation, designing, facilitation, etc.

The purpose of these awards is to provide recognition to the budding contributors who played an exemplary role during a certain release cycle, regardless of what category that role belongs to. Also, the focus is decidedly specific towards budding contributors (either newcomers or returners to the community) and not towards the regulars who have been contributing to the project for a while now, to ensure that we provide them with incentives to continue contributing or, in other cases, increase involvement.

This restriction would be exercised with the use of an artificially introduced cooldown period of two release cycles (i.e. approximately one year period). A certain winner from a Fedora Linux XX release cycle cannot be nominated again until the Fedora Linux XX+2 release cycle to be one of the winners. Also, the slope of increasing favourable contributing activities (using unbiased, agreed-upon contributor metrics) would be utilised to shortlist (and finally select) the folks who would be awarded the said title and prize.

We would be limiting the number of winners per release cycle to a certain number, like ten or twelve, to ensure that the quality of the prizes does not dwindle. Apart from the swagpack that would be sent to the winners, they would also be awarded a badge that is specific to that Fedora Linux release cycle, which recognises their efforts during the same. The shortlisted winners will be contacted for their correspondence details for the delivery of the swagpack, and a blog post will be published to appreciate their actions.

I also want to include the agency of declination of the prizes in the mix, should a certain repeating winner not want to receive them, or simply put, a declination of the nomination itself, to make way for fellow budding contributors. While not asked explicitly, the same would be assumed, so should the connection for the correspondence not get replied to within a certain period around the said Fedora Linux release party. Should that were to happen, the next person on the waitlist would automatically make it into the nomination.

This is the plan from a 10k ft view and would require a lot of details around areas like shortlisting criteria, average price of the swagpack, designing of the badges, publishing of this information, documenting the events processes, etc. and hence, I would require your help with this. Please feel free to ask questions or, heck, suggest changes to the plan I have proposed. There have been some assumptions made while drafting this overall summary, and I would like to use your feedback to tailor the changes to make things work.

Long read, I know.