Tag: Council Hackfest 2024

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.