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:

1. Undertakes activities
2. which sustain or advance the project towards our mission and vision
3. intentionally as part of the Project,
4. 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