Last month, I shared a draft vision statement that the Fedora Council worked on during our face-to-face meeting in November. We got a lot of great feedback on the council-discuss list. When the Fedora Council met after DevConf.CZ, we went over the feedback and came up with a new draft:

The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities.

If you compare it to the first draft, you’ll notice we shortened it to one sentence. We kept the parts we felt were most important: everyone benefiting from free & open source software and the attributes of the communities that make it.

The word benefit is important here. It’s not enough that the software is there, waiting to be used. It has to be accessible and usable. This was much longer in our first draft, so shortening it here seems right.

We also cut out the sentence about Fedora being a reference for everyone who shares this vision. We still want to be that, but that’s implied by the fact that we have this vision in the first place. Why bother expressing a vision that we wouldn’t want to be an influential part of? And frankly, it’s hard to get the wording right, especially in a way that works across languages and cultures.

Is this one sentence enough? Does it encapsulate everything we want in a Fedora Vision? Help us out — we’re sending this through the comment process once more. Give us your feedback on the council-discuss thread in the next two weeks. The Council will vote on the final version after that.