2017 was an active and busy year for Fedora. All year, contributors across all different sub-groups, working groups, special interest groups, and teams make the magic behind Fedora happen. With a project as large as Fedora, it is hard to keep others on different sides of the Project up to date. To help celebrate what we did together this year, consider sharing a “Year in Review” for your sub-groups, teams, or other group on the Fedora Community Blog!

Writing a “Year in Review” article

Writing a Year in Review article is something to talk with your entire subgroup or team about. The best place to start is with any records, reports, or other statistics that you and your team may have to show off some work you’ve done in 2017. Some projects have an easier time to do this than others. If metrics aren’t your team’s best representation, look more to telling the stories or explaining what you’ve been up to in words.

Regardless, follow this outline when gathering information and writing your article.

  1. Introduction: Quick “elevator pitch” of what your subgroup / team does in a sentence or two. Consider the first paragraph of your team / group Fedora Wiki page.
  2. Top 3 Highlights: Choose the top three highlights of what your team did in 2017 – a paragraph for each is enough. Feel free to write or add more if three isn’t enough!
  3. Top Goal for 2018: Decide what major goal your subgroup / team wants to carry out in 2018. As before, you can write or add more if you have more goals in mind!
  4. Conclusion: Sum up anything else you have left or make shout-outs to anyone or any group that helped make your work easier in 2017!

If you follow this format, all Year in Review articles will roughly follow the same format.

Good things to include

Stuck on finding things to include in your report? Picking the highlights might be easier or harder for some groups than others.

If your group is more of a people-oriented group, such as the Ambassadors or Marketing, consider event reports, the number of new Ambassadors for 2017, Magazine highlights, and/or other “stories” that are harder to tell in numbers. Check some good examples from 2015 Year in Review series.

An easy way to find content includes…

  • Event reports
  • Release announcements / notes / change logs
  • Accepted talks / presentations (videos or slides)
  • Links to tagged releases (on GitHub, Pagure, Pypi, Forges, etc.)
  • Most retweeted / liked tweets, most liked / +1’d social media content
  • Most commented blog posts
  • Most active mailing list threads
  • Pictures!
    • A picture is worth a thousand words! Did you attend a hackathon or release party? Have a great pick of the logo out in the wild? Include them in the article (and make sure they are licensed under a Creative Commons license).
  • Wiki change logs
  • Flock / FUDCon / FAD content

Here are some Markdown and HTML templates to help you get started!

Markdown

Introduction
------------
 
Top 3 Highlights
----------------
 *
 *
 *
 
Top Goal(s) for 2018
--------------------
 1.
 2.
 3.
 
Conclusion
----------
 
Links
-----
 *
 *
 *

HTML

<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p> </p>

<h2>Top 3 Highlights</h2>
<ul>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
</ul>

<h2>Top Goal(s) for 2018</h2>
<ol>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
</ol>

<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p> </p>

<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
    <li> </li>
</ul>

Getting help

If you know your team has numbers available but aren’t sure how to collect them or if you need help coming up with ideas of how to tell your story, the Community Operations (CommOps) team is here to help! Feel free to contact us either in IRC at #fedora-commops or on our mailing list.