Hardly anybody argues, that saying thank you isn't something nice. Saying thank you can be done in many ways. But no matter how you say it, the important part of this is that a 'Thank you' for the receiving person means being seen in the effort one brings along, being treated in a nice and respectful way. A 'Thank you' can come a long way to keep others motivated and to let them feel part of a community.

I Love Free Software Day

Since 2010 the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has been celebrating the "I Love Free Software Day". Each year on the 14th of February Free Software enthusiasts reach out to one another, to contributors, to maintainers, developers highlighting their work and thanking them for their commitment to software freedom. With 2022 the FSFE and its local groups started something different for this special day dedicated to Free Software and its contributors. Together they organised small get-togethers, dedicated events all over Europe. It started with one big event and since then there are now over 20 events in over 10 European countries. By now it is not merely the FSFE and the local FSFE groups, but new groups joining the party and taking up the challenge to organise a local event.

Those events are a great opportunity to share and discuss the hot topics around Free Software, to exchange thoughts, work on Free Software projects and to build bridges among each other to strengthen our ever-growing network. However, organising an event, very much like contributing to Free Software, takes time, energy and resources. With some of this, the FSFE tries to help as much as possible, but still the organisation relies upon a small group of dedicated people willing to take up this challenge and to make something truly special for all the Free Software fans in Europe.

Digital 'Thank You'

To highlight the commitment and to say thank you to those who are part of this and who want to let the community around Free Software spire ever more, we have long been thinking about a good way to do this. As for us the question is how we could possibly say thank you in a new and remarkable way. Many ideas floated around, we could be writing a blog post about the effort done by others, we could send postcards, write an email and share the work done by volunteers to bring together a bunch of people. But, we, Bonnie, responsible for the "I Love Free Software Day" at the FSFE and Damian, a dedicated Free Software advocate and volunteer for the FSFE, wanted to have a new and truly unique way of saying 'Thank you' to all the event organisers involved in the "I Love Free Software Day". Then the solution came to us with BadgeFed. A badge, which can be connected to your fediverse account.

The hands-on experience

So we went ahead and started to set up a new issuer on the instance, Damian, has been operating. We made three sets of badges, each issued in a different way. One for event organisers, which we issued manually to people responsible for the „I Love Free Software Day“ event in different cities. One for contributors, which they distributed by a unique URL organisers had, and one for participants which was supposed to be easy to collect and displayed as a QR code between presentations.

Because of how BadgeFed is designed the issuer can be migrated to a new instance, operated by FSFE. This allows us to keep to already issued badges. Only requirement for this is to have the proper set of keys. BadgeFed also supports RBAC, which is great, since you do not have to allow one user to access your other issuers. Smart design choices like this allow you to tinker freely and then the proof of concept works smothly and migrate without much pain.

Conclusion

BadgeFed is very easy to use and it is an amazing option to just let others know how much this person has done for the „I Love Free Software Day“, how much time the person has dedicated into organising something for the community, and to let them know your contribution has not gone by unnoticed. So, we invite you to create different badges yourself. We are still playing around with OpenBadges and will tinker with BadgeFed over the next years...so stay tuned for more badges.