In January 2023, the Fedora Council approved a title change for the Fedora community role. The Fedora Community Action & Impact Coordinator (FCAIC) is now renamed to Fedora Community Architect (FCA).

Does a title change make sense?

Last December, I was working together with Matthew Miller and Ben Cotton on our role pages in the Council docs, as part of a planned review of our role documentation. While reviewing the FCAIC role documentation, I took a new look at the role title and whether I felt it was still right. While it does describe the role and responsibilities well, it still doesn’t feel quite right to me, in a similar way that Community Lead didn’t feel right in 2016. I spent some time thinking about the FCAIC role, how it has changed over the years, and what I feel it describes. Since I am still early in the role, it felt like a good time to consider a title change.

I settled on Fedora Community Architect as the new title for the FCAIC role. In addition to being shorter, I feel like it better describes the role. Community work does not have an industry-accepted job ladder, as is more common with software engineering. Red Hat eventually settled on the title of community architect to encapsulate and describe community work in its pioneering open source communities. I also like Community Architect as a title. There is more literature and examples for others to understand the work.

Why change to Fedora Community Architect?

Ultimately, the goal of changing the name is to better describe the role and what the FCA does in Fedora. In many ways, the work for this role is like an architect. I can help make plans and map out where we want to go, but many times, I am not the one doing the work and “building” the community. In Fedora, our community is self-actualizing and often is responsible for building itself! This is visible in the many arms of the project shown in the organization chart. While the FCA may spend more time in parts of this chart than others, my role focuses on enabling and supporting others to accomplish their goals within the scope of the Fedora Project charter.

Furthermore, the lengthy “FCAIC” title usually came with an explanation to others unfamiliar with Fedora and our community culture. FCA is also a handy shortening of the longer FCAIC acronym too!

What do you think about this title change? Does it make sense? Do you have questions? Let me know your feedback in the comments.