Category: Council (page 1 of 5)

The Fedora Council is our top-level community leadership and governance body. It is responsible for stewardship of the Fedora Project as a whole, and supports the health and growth of the Fedora community.

Proposed change to the Fedora Council policy for Edition promotion

October 24, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

The Fedora Council is considering a change to our policy for promotion of a Fedora deliverable to “Edition” status. Please read that entire document for context before commenting.

This change is being made to reflect actual practice. For example, there is clear overlap between the use-cases and potential user-bases for the current Server, Cloud, and CoreOS Editions, but each takes a different approach. We are currently considering adding an exception for a KDE Desktop Edition, which would overlap with Fedora Workstation.

Currently part of the policy currently reads in a way that prevents this exception from being possible:

A Fedora Edition:

addresses a distinct, relevant, and broad use-case or user-base that a Fedora Edition is not currently serving;

is a long term investment for the Fedora Project; and

is consistent with all of Fedora’s Four Foundations.

We propose an additional line:

The Council may make exceptions to the “distinct” rule when we determine that doing so best fits the Project’s Mission and Vision.

This topic is open for community discussion, following our Policy Change Policy. After two weeks, the Council will vote in a new ticket, and if approved, the policy will be updated.

Approval of this change would not automatically mean the approval of a KDE Desktop Edition, but would allow that possibility.

Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash. Modified by Justin W. Flory. CC BY-SA 4.0

Introducing the Fedora Community Operations Initiative

July 16, 2024 / rwright / Comments Off

We’re excited to unveil the Fedora Community Operations initiative, an endeavor to boost community engagement, support everyone with more events and contribution points, and build on our amazing culture.

What is the Fedora Community Operations Initiative?

At its heart, the Community Operations Initiative is all about making Fedora an even better place to collaborate and connect. We’re focusing on two main contribution areas: Contributor Experience and Community Social Analytics. Contributor Experience means working on unified documentation, improving onboarding processes, and organizing fantastic virtual events like the Fedora Linux 40 and 41 Release Parties. Community Social Analytics will explore data from our infrastructure tools, applications, and services to help Fedora leadership and the community make smarter decisions, ultimately making Fedora an even more welcoming and efficient community for everyone.

Fedora Strategy 2028: High-Level View

May 8, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

As described in Fedora Strategy 2028: April 2024 Update, we came out of our annual face-to-face meeting with a new presentation for our strategy for the next five years. That article gave the background — this is the high-level strategy itself.

Our Guiding Star

We’re going to double the number of contributors who are active every week.

What we’re measuring — and why

Our goal is to ensure that Fedora is healthy and sustainable. As a project, we’re generally in great shape. However: there are many areas where everyone feels under-resourced, and we have too many places where we have a very poor “yak farm factor” — if one or two people are ready for a change and go off to start new lives, will the areas they’re working in collapse? Plus, there’s always so much more exciting new stuff that we could be doing, and maybe need to do to remain relevant as the computing landscape changes.

We can measure aspects of this in many different ways: interconnectedness, onboarding, burnout, team resilience, and so many more. But, the weekly-active-contributor number gives us a simple, basic check. If that number is going up, we must be doing something right.

The metric itself isn’t the goal in itself.. We don’t want to merely inflate a number, after all. So, we also plan to watch those other community health metrics, and we’ll adjust as needed to make sure that the Guiding Star is really leading us to the right path.

What is a contributor?

This means different things to different people and is often different across projects. However, for this purpose, we’re using a broad definition.

A Fedora Project contributor is anyone who:

Undertakes activities
which sustain or advance the project towards our mission and vision
intentionally as part of the Project,
and as part of our community in line with our shared values.

Fedora has numerous already-public data sources for activity, and we plan to use those as widely as possible. Unlike smaller projects, we can’t simply count commits in a git repo — and, I think that’s a good thing, because in order to get a meaningful number, we need to count more than just code and other technical contributions.

Next: Foundations and Focus Areas

Upcoming posts:

Freedom Foundation: Accessibility; Cross-Community Collaboration
Friends Foundation: Mentorship; Local Communities; Collaboration Tooling
Features Foundation: Preinstalled Systems; SIG Revamp; AI; Marketing
First Foundation: Atomic (“Immutable”); Language Stacks; Spins & Rebuilds

Fedora Strategy 2028: April 2024 Update

April 10, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

from Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, on behalf of the Fedora Council

First, a personal note! As you may have seen, I was out sick with Covid for a month after getting home from our annual Council face-to-face meeting. It’s not been fun — some respiratory symptoms, but primarily, overwhelming fatigue. Somewhat ironically, the timing suggests that I managed to avoid catching anything at FOSDEM itself (where I wore a mask most of the time), or at the Council meeting, but rather on the plane or in the airport on the way back. Although emergency measures have been lifted, there really is still a pandemic going on. Be careful, everyone, especially when traveling! In any case, I’m back to myself now, and am excited for Fedora’s next big steps.

The Story so Far

So! I’ve been talking about “Strategy 2028” for a while — we started this effort seriously about a year ago. If you’re just joining in, or want a refresher, Fedora Strategy 2028: a topic index for our planning process is a great place to start. I won’t rehash all of that here.

The important thing is: 2023 was kind of a hard year, and although we made some progress, we lost momentum. The Council hackfest helped get things back on track, and we’re moving forward now. We’re not making any fundamental changes, but we are restructuring how we present things — and we’re moving on from theory to practical work.

A banner image with a black background, dotted with various stars, much like a galaxy system. Four rockets with colors of the Fedora Four Foundations leave a colored trail behind them that overlaps, as the rockets propel toward the right-side of the image in lockstep. White text is overlaid on the image, reading "The Fedora Project community." This image is often used with Fedora elections.

Image by Ryan Lerch. CC BY-SA 4.0

2024 Git Forge Evaluation

April 5, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

Vol. I – Fedora Council 2024 Hackfest

During the Council’s February 2024 hackfest, we discussed the future of Fedora’s git forge – that is, the platform Fedora uses for version control and tracking for packages, source code, documentation, and more. This topic has been around for quite some time. If you are just coming into this conversation, or would like a refresher, #git-forge-future is a good place to start.

Instead of one huge post, the Fedora Council divided the follow-ups from our hack-fest into a mini-series of posts throughout April that will cover all the topics we discussed and made decisions on. In each post, we will walk through one core topic, and share our discussion and thought process on how we reached our outcomes. The first in this series, because why not start strong 🙂 , is an update on our git forge evaluation. Read on for important information.

Fedora Org Chart: Now updated!

August 1, 2023 / riecatnor / 8 Comments

We updated the “How is Fedora Organized?” page on Fedora docs with the org chart below. This chart shows governing bodies, teams, editions, spins/labs, and initiatives. Is your Fedora thing missing? Feel free to comment on this Discussion post to ask for an update.

Survey Image link

Take the Fedora Annual Contributor Survey 2023!

July 13, 2023 / bookwar / 3 Comments

The Fedora Council wants to hear what you have to say! Take the anonymous survey now.

As before we are interested in the usage of tools and communication channels, your roles, your favorite apps and programming languages. This year we also specifically ask about the development mailing list.

website and apps council objective status update

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Wrapping up the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative: Part II

May 11, 2023 / t0xic0der / Comments Off

This is the second post in a series covering details about the journey of the Fedora Websites and Apps community Initiative, those who were involved in making it a grand success, and what lies ahead down the road for the team. If you have not already, read the previous post before delving into this one.

Off track and back on again

We started off with having recorded meetings on video conferencing platforms like Jitsi Meet. Around August 2021 we decided against to accommodate more fruitful and open discussions. Eventually, we developed rules and regulations for in-call discipline to ensure that everyone in the meeting got equal representation.

Months passed by with us slowly moving into rewriting our first application, Meetbot Logs, and our first website, Fedora Easyfix. That is when one of our founding members, Nasir Hussain, had to leave for a while. For a fast-moving and quickly evolving team that takes on multiple projects at once, this also was unfortunately the time when many disagreements among the ambitious members plagued the team’s progress. Development stalled for some weeks before we were again helped by Justin W. Flory (J.W.F.) and Marie Nordin.

Adding interns

Back on track now — around October 2021 — we started looking for interns to mentor under our wings for the Outreachy 2021 winter cohort. We looked at the existing projects that we maintain and the new projects we wanted to prototype and develop. Vipul Siddharth helped me and Onuralp Sezer to create a mentored projects proposal. Soon after, Francois Andrieu joined me and Michael Scherer joined Onuralp Sezer to mentor the Outreachy applicants.

To ensure that we are well equipped to lead the Council objective, Ramya Parimi, Justin W. Flory, Matthew Miller, Marie Nordin, and I started having a Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Leads meeting every couple of weeks. We made a lot of progress with a two-track approach to development and planning with the help of one of the Fedora Websites veterans, Rick Elrod. Gregory Lee Bartholomew and Graham White joined us then from the (now, defunct) Fedora Program Management team.

Departures and additions

The time of December 2021 was yet again a time for setbacks. Life became increasingly busy and our council objective co-lead Ramya Parimi announced she was stepping down. This dealt a great impact on me as with Ramya Parimi and Sayak Sarkar looking into the planning and documentation side of things. Before that, I could spend most of my time doing what I liked to do — developing and maintaining the codebase of our projects with the team. To this date, I like to think that we have not yet recovered from that loss and I do look forward to her return to the community as well as the team. Also, the development of Fedora Easyfix, which I was doing for a long time under Pierre-Yves Chibon’s guidance and Masha Leonova’s assistance, had to be abandoned due to the lack of interest within the community in using the project. Thankfully, we had some things going well at around the same time – which included Graham White stepping up as the new Council objective co-lead and the project led by Onuralp Sezer for making the Fedora Project organization chart as an interactive website.

With the vast amount of knowledge around program management that Graham White brought to the table, he also became a part of the Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Co-Leads team and joined the efforts for revamping our Fedora Websites and Apps Team. By around February 2022, we had Pawel Zelawski bringing in a wave of positive change by helping lead the efforts of revamping our main websites. With him, a variety of stakeholders like Ankur Sinha, Timothee Ravier, Peter Boy, Allan Day, Luna Jernberg, Kevin Fenzi, and many more joined us in the Fedora Websites and Apps Stakeholders Team – helping us understand what our renewed websites offering Fedora Linux really need. This is also right around the time when the community efforts around building our Fedora Linux websites slowly started off and the team got two Outreachy interns, Subhangi Choudhary, and Ojong Enow, getting mentored and working on extending my rewrite of Mote called Fragment and Onuralp Sezer’s project about interactive Fedora Project organization chart called Fedora Graphs 1.

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Wrapping up the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative: Part I

May 2, 2023 / t0xic0der / Comments Off

With the Fedora Websites 3.0 out alongside the release of Fedora Linux 38 and the redevelopment of Fedora Badges in full swing, it could not have been a better time than now to close the community initiative as a success. Let’s look back at how far we came from where we started. This is the first in a series of five posts detailing the journey of Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative, those who were involved in making it a grand success, and what lies ahead for the team.

Council policy proposal: equalize “auxiliary” positions

April 6, 2023 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

At our hackfest earlier this year, the Council agreed that we want to drop the distinction between full and auxiliary positions on the Council. Instead, we should have all members on an equal footing. The concerns expressed by some on the former Fedora Board (the predecessor to the Council) haven’t come to pass. But we have seen a negative impact: people in these roles feel less empowered to act, and unsure about their standing as a “real” member of the Council.

I propose to remove this distinction. Please discuss this in the Fedora Discussion topic. The Council will begin voting on this proposal on 21 April.