For my open source contribution, I decided to contribute to the Fedora tagger program, which can be accessed through this URL: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/tagger/gappalib-coq Since I was pressed for time, I didn’t really have the appetite to contribute to anything to intensive. Luckily I got an idea from Ga Kay to contribute to the Fedora tagger program. According to Fedora Tagger’s profile page on www.openhub.net, Fedora Tagger is a small tagger app for the Fedora community.

The reason why I chose this for my open source contribution was because it didn’t really take much intellectual effort as far as coding is concerned. It was also pretty quick and easy to pick up. Basically a webpage opens up that shows the name of a Fedora package along with additional documentation for the package if you need it. The webpage then lists out a series of tags, and basically asks the simple question of whether that tag applies to the package displayed. If you think it does apply, then you hit a thumbs up button, but if you don’t think it applies then you click the thumbs down button. According to a blog post (http://threebean.org/blog/new-fedora-tagger/) written by a fedora tagger developer that I ran across in my research, “…is a webapp that allows users to upvote/downvote tags on packages as well as rate packages themselves. The data ends up getting pulled into yum repo metadata by the bodhi masher and into the Fedora Packages indexer to improve search results. Fedora Tagger is also one of our first attempts at “gamification”. You earn “points” by voting and rating and there’s a leaderboard on which you can muscle for first place(!)”

At first I was highly tentative to contribute, because obviously the question popped into my head: “What if someone who doesn’t know Fedora that well (example: me) picks a tag that actually doesn’t really apply to the package?”. This was the case for several of the packages. Even after reading the documentation, there were some tags that were offered which I wasn’t completely sure applied directly to the package I was trying to describe. Ultimately, though I figured any possible bad tagging decision that was made by me would be u ndone by a swarm of correct answers from people more experienced with Fedora than me.