The Fedora Council stuck around Brno the day after DevConf.CZ to have a day-long working session. This is part of our newly-adopted regular cadence of in-person meetings. We mostly used this day to follow up on some items from the November meeting, including the vision statement.
Updated vision statement
When we published our draft vision statement in January, we got a lot of great feedback from the Fedora community. The Council discussed this and ended up with a streamlined version:
The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities.
We published this last month for another round of discussion and the Council recently approved this as the final version. I’m proud of the work we did to come up with something simple that reflects the values of our community. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback, you really helped us make this better.
Objective closeouts
At the meeting, Dominik Perpeet told us that he considers the CI Objective complete. The team has done amazing work in the last few releases. Rawhide can now gate single- and multi-package updates, which gives us a powerful tool to make Rawhide a more usable platform for our users. Now it’s up to us to use this tooling. Dominik will be writing a Community Blog post to wrap up the Objective.
We also agreed that the Modularity Objective, as currently scoped, is complete. I wrote about this in more detail earlier this month, but to reiterate: the Modularity development within Red Hat has moved to a new team. This team will pick up the work and continue to improve Modularity within Fedora.
Video meetings
We agreed in November to bring back our regular video meetings, so in January we put a plan into action. The video meetings will happen on the second Wednesday of each month at the normal Council meeting time. We will have a featured guest each month, and if time permits will also conduct routine business.
We’ve done two of these so far. In February, our new FCAIC introduced herself. If you haven’t met Marie Nordin yet, check out her video. In March, Aoife Moloney from the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team shared the team’s workflow and took questions from the community.
The April and May meetings already have guests scheduled. If you have suggestions for future meetings, please add them to the wish list on the wiki and Ben Cotton will work to get them scheduled. You may notice that we switched from Jitsi to Bluejeans for these meetings. While we want to use open source tools whenever we can, the experience on Jitsi made it very difficult to have conversations. We chose Bluejeans because it does not require users to create an account, which we know is important to our community.
Community Platform Engineering
Speaking of Aoife Moloney, she also stopped by our meeting in January since she was in town for DevConf.CZ. Aoife gave us a preview of the presentation she gave in the March video meeting and took questions from the Council. The primary goals of the changes in CPE’s workflow are to increase the visibility of work and to make sure the team isn’t overloaded.
The Fedora Council will be the contact point for large infrastructure work coming from the Fedora community. We have a great relationship with Aoife and the team, so while we’re going to have some bumps as everyone figures out the new process, I’m confident that the end result will be a better, more reliable infrastructure for building Fedora.
Council initiatives
Ben Cotton presented a plan for focusing our event strategy on recruiting new contributors. He is working on developing this into something our Ambassadors and Advocates can put into action. Look for a Community Blog post soon.
Marie Nordin is putting her design skills to use to improve the org chart. This is not just about the visual look, which needs improvement, but also includes rethinking some of the teams under Mindshare. Some of the teams are overfragmented compared to the number of contributors, which adds overhead and can prevent collaboration. Marie is working with the Mindshare Committee to explore combining some teams to revitalize them. Again, look for a Community Blog post soon.
Lastly, some people have been asking about the logo redesign from last year. You may recall that the Council approved a new design, but we were too late to get it in Red Hat legal’s budget. With a new fiscal year, we’re ready to move forward on that. Mo Duffy is making a few minor tweaks to the approved version, and once that’s done, we will give it to the legal team for registration globally. Expect to see the new logo sometime this year.
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