council April 2017

council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org

26 participants
9 discussions

Updating the Fedora Project Mission
by Matthew Miller 28 Apr '17

28 Apr '17

Background ---------- Way back in 2003, the original Fedora Project mission statement¹ was straightforward — “to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.” This has some virtue: it's clear and concrete, and it encodes the values of community and open source. But, it's also rather small; arguably this was _already done_, so, you know, “good job everyone” — backslapping ensues, nothing more needed, right? After 6½ years, the Fedora Board (the precursor to our current Fedora Council) decided it was time for a refresh, and put a lot of work into coming up with our current mission² (as well as a vision and objectives). That mission is “to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.” This has many virtues too — it's ambitious, and again keeps those key values front and center. But, it's also very broad. If we were to start a project with a clean slate today to do what the mission says, I don't think we'd even _think_ of creating a Linux distro. There are plenty of other activities that could consume an entire large pro-free-and-open-source project. When we started Fedora.next, we decided to work underneath the mission as it stood. This has worked out well enough, but we're coming up to what feels like the limit. This is clear in the "Budget.next" process — it's one thing to say that spending is to be determined in public based on clear objectives and measurable results, but for it to really work, those objectives need to be attached to a goal with a more clear scope. It's now been another 6½ years, and it’s the perfect time to revisit the mission — to look at who we are, what we do well, what we really want to do, what we say we do but actually don't, and so on. Our Thinking ------------ At our in-person activity days at the end of March, the Fedora Council did just that. We spent some time discussing those questions and worked on lists of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. We talked about the Fedora Foundations as well, and agreed that we do want to keep these as statements of our core values. We wanted something which would answer: * What do we do? * How do we do it? * Who do we do it for? * and, what unique value do we bring? After a long and productive working discussion, we decided to break for dinner, and come back the next morning to actually draft a new statement to bring to the community for discussion, adjustment, and approval. Brian scribbled down a quick idea in the evening, and in the morning we started bright and early at adding to, subtracting from, rewording, deconstructing, and reconstructing, until we came up with something that everyone on the Council felt good about. The New Mission Draft --------------------- So, here it is: Fedora creates an innovative platform that lights up hardware, clouds, and containers for software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users. Let's Break It Down ------------------- We decided to not write a new vision statement at this point. The Four Foundations³ — Freedom, Friends, Features, First — both state our core values and illustrate our overall goals and objectives. However, we do want to make sure that some of the various parts of the mission are explained. * Creates an innovative platform — at the operating system level, we don’t just integrate.We do new things. This is what makes us a platform and not just a distribution. And, “innovative” is just a buzzword. Current examples include solving the “too fast / too slow” problem with Modularity, exploring ostree for delivery and updates, and the Layered Image Build Service, where containers become a first-class part of the OS. - Lights up hardware, clouds, and containers — We want to be specific about a primary focus as an enablement layer for environments people want to use. - For software developers to build tailored solutions for their users — this includes both upstream software developers and downstream communities who want to build on what we create. - For community members to build tailored solutions for their users — Fedora isn’t just the toolkit. Many of our contributors are here to collaborate to create solutions for specific user problems, ranging from Fedora Workstation to Fedora Robotics Suite. We have lots of ways to do this within the project, from Editions to Spins and Labs to the upcoming Fedora Playground concept. The core emphasis, though, is on enabling this collaboration. Next Steps ---------- We really hope our proposed mission statement makes sense to all of you and tries to capture what we want to be for the next three to five years. We would be very interested in feedback from the community, not just in how to make the language tighter but, truly, on the goals of the project and how we can better capture the ethos of Fedora. ---- 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20031008035915/http://fedora.redhat.com/about/ 2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#Our_Mission 3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations -- Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader

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[Fedocal] Reminder meeting : Council (Open Floor)
by mattdm＠fedoraproject.org 25 Apr '17

25 Apr '17

Dear all, You are kindly invited to the meeting: Council (Open Floor) on 2017-04-26 from 09:00:00 to 10:00:00 US/Eastern At fedora-meeting(a)irc.freenode.net The meeting will be about: The Fedora Council will hold our regular Open Floor meeting at 9:00am US/Eastern in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome! To convert to your local time, run: TZ=US/Eastern date -d '9am tomorrow' Open Floor meetings happen every other week. They do not have a preset agenda. Instead, we spend the first few minutes of the meeting deciding what topics will be discussed. If attendees — Council members and otherwise — have several topics of general interest, the primary meeting chair (usually the FPL or FCAIC) will put them in order, and after a certain amount of time discussing the first, ask if it's time to move on. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council_Meetings#Open_Floor_Meetings Source: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/5229/

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[Fedocal] Reminder meeting : Council (Subproject Report)
by mattdm＠fedoraproject.org 18 Apr '17

18 Apr '17

Dear all, You are kindly invited to the meeting: Council (Subproject Report) on 2017-04-19 from 09:00:00 to 10:00:00 US/Eastern At fedora-meeting(a)irc.freenode.net The meeting will be about: The Fedora Council will hold our regular Subproject Report meeting this week at 9:00am US/Eastern in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome! To convert to your local time, run: TZ=US/Eastern date -d '9am tomorrow' This is not an IRC meeting; it will be conducted via video chat. This week's primary meeting chair (usually the FPL or FCAIC) will reply to this message with specific information. To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UTCHowto or run: date -d 'tomorrow 14:00 UTC' Source: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/5237/

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Re: Updating the Fedora Project Mission
by Neal Gompa 15 Apr '17

15 Apr '17

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 9:55 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote: > > The New Mission Draft > --------------------- > > So, here it is: > > Fedora creates an innovative platform that lights up hardware, > clouds, and containers for software developers and community > members to build tailored solutions for their users. > On one hand, I do like the renewed focus on making Fedora a better platform for people to build their own great solutions. I hope this means that there will be increased interest in this field (as opposed to lackluster interest for the last few years...). However, I'm extremely concerned that Free and Open Source Software isn't mentioned at all in the mission draft. One of the key things that makes Fedora attractive (in my view) is its highly principled stance on providing the best of Free Software, and while we have been watering that down in recent years (like making it less awful to use the proprietary nVidia driver on Fedora), we haven't actually gotten to the point that we're distributing non-free/proprietary software. I'd like it to stay that way. I also think that being an operating system is still a very important aspect of Fedora, and many, many, many people care about this aspect deeply (myself included). It's quite troubling that the Council seems to think that it's okay to let go of these very core aspects of us now. While it might be true that if Fedora was created in 2017, it might not be a full Linux distribution, that's certainly not what happened, and our community is shaped by its experiences. Heck, I've been a contributor to Fedora for nearly a decade, and I've been a user for longer than that. For me (and many others like myself), the FOSS principles and the operating system aspect of the project both matter quite heavily. It's also worth pointing out that if people are seeing it as uninteresting and boring, then perhaps we just need a better message around why it's exciting to help develop a fully featured Free operating system. The new message may even help in that, but we have to remember that we haven't actually "won" the war for Free and Open Source software. There are all-new battles to fight and some of the same old battles are there too. Please consider integrating these core aspects into a new mission draft. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

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[Fedocal] Reminder meeting : Council (Open Floor)
by mattdm＠fedoraproject.org 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

Dear all, You are kindly invited to the meeting: Council (Open Floor) on 2017-04-12 from 09:00:00 to 10:00:00 US/Eastern At fedora-meeting(a)irc.freenode.net The meeting will be about: The Fedora Council will hold our regular Open Floor meeting at 9:00am US/Eastern in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome! To convert to your local time, run: TZ=US/Eastern date -d '9am tomorrow' Open Floor meetings happen every other week. They do not have a preset agenda. Instead, we spend the first few minutes of the meeting deciding what topics will be discussed. If attendees — Council members and otherwise — have several topics of general interest, the primary meeting chair (usually the FPL or FCAIC) will put them in order, and after a certain amount of time discussing the first, ask if it's time to move on. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council_Meetings#Open_Floor_Meetings Source: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/5229/

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Sub-project report request: May 24, Marketing
by Justin W. Flory 11 Apr '17

11 Apr '17

Hello all, I wanted to reach out and formally request the May 24 sub-project report slot for Fedora Marketing. We're currently working on building what we want to share with the Council and believe we will be ready in time to present in May. Brian Proffitt and Eduard Lucena will be delivering the presentation on behalf of Marketing. Please let us know if this will be possible and if there's anything else we need to do to put this in the calendar. :) Thanks all! -- Cheers, Justin W. Flory jflory7(a)gmail.com

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Fedora Council FAD Report - 2017/2018 Initial Steps
by Brian Exelbierd 10 Apr '17

10 Apr '17

The Fedora Council met for an in-person FAD for three days from 26-28 March in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Almost the entire Council was able to attend. Josh Boyer, Brian Exelbierd, Robert Mayr, Matthew Miller, and Langdon White, were present, and unfortunately, Jan Kuřik and María Leandro could not make it. We chose Grand Rapids to accommodate one of the two members with travel challenges and to reduce overall travel costs for the rest of us. We set a full agenda^0 and managed to discuss the topics over the three full days. We spent the majority of the first and second days considering the current state of the project. We focused on "What we actually do; What we do *well*; What we say we do but don't; and What we aspire to." Using a variety of tools including SWOT analysis (that's Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threads) and Kellogg Logic Models^1, we carefully considered how the Fedora Project fits into the competitive landscape and how we can move forward achieving success while living our values^2. We considered scope, as well: what we should address directly and what we should enable by empowering others. A key result of this is a proposed new mission statement for the Fedora Project, which will be shared, along with some detail on the thought behind it, in a follow-on post. These thoughts include alignment of our objectives and our budget to achieve this mission. This should also bring some clarity to our overall target audience. The third day was focused on core decisions and processes for our community: * We extended our focus on diversity and inclusion in order to increase our ability to attract a variety of thoughts to power our project. To that end we are going to empower the Diversity Advisor with some direct budget allocation to achieve this vision. In Fiscal Year 2017 we allocated $6,500 for Diversity and Inclusion, however 100% of that money was really to support an Outreachy^3 intern. While this is a noble cause which the Council fully supports, we want to allow the Diversity and Inclusion group to use the budget to further their objective directly. Therefore, in Fiscal Year 2018 we are allocating $9,000 for Diversity and Inclusion. The Diversity Working Group^4 under the guidance of the Diversity Advisor will need to decide how to best use these resources and whether we should continue to support Outreachy. Additional funds may be allocated as there is a need and good ideas. * We gave some initial thoughts to the Code of Conduct^5. The Diversity Working Group has done a great job surfacing some needs related to this area and we are thankful for the work they have done. We have realized that after the Community Working Group shut down a few issues and challenges had gone unanswered. We, as the Council, will be taking this issue forward with an emphasis on an open and transparent process related to the Code of Conduct. We have some paths forward to explore and look forward to having an open conversation with the community . * We had some great conversations about the signature events held by the project. We realized that some of the events haven't necessarily been accomplishing their goals because they have been overly broad or no longer aligned with the realities of today. Therefore we are taking the following actions: ** We want to make sure that Flock is attended by as many contributors as possible from all around the world. We also recognize that we have to live within our budget and cannot afford to fully fund every person who would possibly attend. Therefore we are initially going to increase the Flock budget from the $75,000 it had in Fiscal Year 2017 to $85,000 in Fiscal Year 2018. This will allow for a few more funded attendees from regions that have traditionally not been well represented. However, we are also going to work on both the goals of the event and how it is funded overall. There will be a follow up post and discussion about these changes as we seek community input. We discussed the possibility of Flock rotating to APAC and LATAM as well as NA and EMEA, although that may be realistically limited by travel budget constraints. ** Additionally, we are not going to create a line-item budget for regional FUDCons. Instead, we are going to allocate budget for great ideas. We want to make sure the community has the freedom to create the outreach events we need, not just do the outreach events dictated by the budget. This doesn’t mean we won’t do regional events; instead we want to fund regional events that are clearly going to accomplish great things and be good uses of funds as well. This may even mean that we continue to support a FUDCon in some regions, if that turns out to be the great idea. Or, it may be another idea, like doing smaller but more frequent Fedora Meetups. * Mindshare is the currency of our project. We aren't in the sales business; we are in the ideas business. Last year FAmSCo started working on an outreach committee concept called FOSCo. For various reasons this didn't happen. We recognize that FOSCo is only one way to achieve the larger goal of growing our mindshare. This year we have asked Robert Mayr to focus on this challenge and created the Mindshare Representative^6 on the Council by changing the title of the seat set aside for FOSCo. Robert will be leading an open and transparent effort to help our project align around mindshare goals. To help him succeed we have allocated a budget of $9,000 so that he can drive forward with implementation. Additional funds can be allocated as there are needs and good ideas. * Ambassadors are a key component of our project and our "feet on the ground." We realize that the Mindshare position above will involve a lot of work with the existing Ambassadors group. However, we can't make our Ambassadors wait for this to be solved. Therefore we allocated a full Quarter 1 budget for the ambassador regions. We based this allocation on one-fourth of the total annual spending from last year. The goal is to allow our Ambassador groups to be funded through the end of the conversation about our new mission. The new allocations replace the stop gap budget^7 that was provided earlier. These are hard allocations that should not be exceeded. The Fiscal Year 2018 Quarter 1 budgets for the regions are: APAC $1,600; LATAM $1,300; EMEA $4,100; NA $4,250. These are not budget cuts; they are a way of preserving flexibility. We want to preserve funding for any changes the ambassadors will want to make as they align around the new mission. We hope the ambassadors will give very careful thought before committing to any events after June 1 to ensure they will help us with our mission. This post is being sent to both the Fedora Community Blog and the council-discuss mailing list. Please follow up with your comments in the mailing list thread here, as we don’t want to split the discussion. 0: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorap… 1: https://pagure.io/FedoraLogicModelTemplate 2: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations 3: http://www.outreachy.org/ 4: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Diversity 5: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct 6: https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/102 7: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorap…

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Diversity Adviser Role
by María Leandro 04 Apr '17

04 Apr '17

Hello all. As some of you know (or not) I'm currently on my last pregnancy month, which has been a high risk pregnancy that has kept me AFK. The Diversity Team has grow from a single person role to a group effort that has prove to be a complete success. In order to be fair with the team and with myself, for the next months (probably half a year) my time will be limited with the new family member, so I hope the council can either find a replacement from the great team we already have, or consolide the group and not take the role as a single person one. Anyway, hope the timing is good, and lets keep making Fedora great! -- tatica Maria Gracia Leandro http://www.tatica.org http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:tatica LinuxUser= 440285 GPG Public Key: E1CDCC56

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[Fedocal] Reminder meeting : Council (Tickets and Ongoing)
by mattdm＠fedoraproject.org 04 Apr '17

04 Apr '17

Dear all, You are kindly invited to the meeting: Council (Tickets and Ongoing) on 2017-04-05 from 09:00:00 to 10:00:00 US/Eastern At fedora-meeting(a)irc.freenode.net The meeting will be about: The Fedora Council will hold our regular Tickets and Ongoing meeting at 9:00am US/Eastern in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome! To convert to your local time, run: TZ=US/Eastern date -d '9am tomorrow' Tickets and Ongoing meetings happen every four weeks. We don't want to be entirely ticket-driven (since that's a reactive process), but this helps keep important issues from slipping through the cracks. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council_Meetings#Tickets_and_Ongoing_Meetings The primary chair for this meeting (usually the FPL or FCAIC) should reply to this message with this week's agenda. Source: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/5247/

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MOVED to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/council April 2017