It’s time again to talk about strategy2028 — our high-level plan for the next few years. Since it’s been a while since I’ve given an update, I’m going to start at the top. If this is new to you, or if you’ve forgotten all about it, you don’t need to go sifting through history for a refresher.
If you’ve been following along for a while, you may want to skip down to the Process section, or if you just want to get to the practical stuff, all the way down to Right Now.
The Strategic Framework and High Level Stuff
Fedora’s Goals
Vision
The ultimate goal of the Fedora Project is expressed in our Vision Statement:
The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities.
Mission
Our Mission Statement describes how we do that — we make a software platform that people can use to build tailored solutions. That includes offerings from our own community (like the Fedora Editions or Atomic Desktops) and those from our “downstreams” (like RHEL, Amazon Linux, Bazzite, and many more).
Strategy 2028
We also have a medium-term goal — the target of Strategy 2028. We have a “guiding star” metric for this:
Guiding Star
By the end of 2028, double the number of contributors[1] active every week.
But this isn’t really the goal. It’s a “proximate measure” — something simple we can count and look at to tell if we’re on track.[2]
The Goal of Strategy 2028
The goal itself this:
The Fedora Project is healthy, growing, relevant, and ready to take on the next quarter-century.
But, goals aren’t strategy — they describe the world we want, and Fedora’s overall work, but not the path we’ll take to get there.
The Actual Strategy
During our session on this topic, I realized that we haven’t really put this into writing, instead jumping straight to other levels of the process. So, from the hackfest, here it is:
1. Identify areas of community interest and effort which we believe will advance us towards our goal.
The computing world changes quickly, and Fedora is a community-driven project. We can’t pick things out of thin air or wishful thinking. We also need to pick things that really, actually, practically will make a difference, and that’s a hard call. Making these calls is the fundamental job of the Fedora Council.[3]
2. Invest in those areas.
A strategy needs to have focus to be meaningful. The Council will devote time, energy, publicity, and community funding towards the selected areas. This necessarily means that other things won’t get the same investment. At least, not right now.
3. Check if the things we picked are working.
The “guiding star” metric is one way, of course, but we’ll need specific metrics, too. At the meeting, we agreed that we have been lazy on this in the past. It’s hard work, and when something isn’t working, can lead to hard conversations. We need to do better — keep reading for how we plan to do that.
4. When things are working, double down. When things aren’t, stop, change, or switch direction.
If we’re on the right track in one area, we should consider what we can do next to build on that. When something isn’t working, we need to take decisive action. That might be re-scoping an initiative, relaunching in the same area but with a different approach, or simply wrapping up. What we won’t do is let things linger on uncertainly.
5. Rinse, repeat!
Some of what we choose will be smaller bites, and some will be more ambitious. That means we expect to be choosing new initiatives several times a year.
The Process
Practically speaking, for each area we choose, we’ll launch a new Community Initiative. We know these haven’t been a smashing success in Fedora, but the general concept is sound. We’re going to do a few things differently, driven by our Fedora Operations Architect. (Thanks, @amoloney.)
Better Community Initiatives
First, we will require better initial proposals. We need to see concrete milestones with dates and deliverables. There needs to be a specific plan of action — for example, if the Initiative intends to progress its technical work through a series of Changes, the plan should include a list of expected proposals with a brief description for each.[4]
Second, we will hold initiatives accountable. Each Initiative Lead should produce a monthly or weekly status report, and we will actively review each initiative every quarter.
Third, we will create “playbooks” for the roles of Initiative Lead and Executive Sponsor.
The Lead is responsible for the work, and the Sponsor is accountable for its success. We’re working on written guidance and onboarding material so that when we start an Initiative, the people involved at the Council level know what they actually need to do.
Finally, we will provide better support. We’ll help develop the Initative’s Logic Model rather than requiring it as part of the submission. We will be better at broadcasting the leadership of each Initiative, so community members (and the leaders themselves!) know that they’re empowered to do the work. We’ll make sure Initiatives are promoted at Fedora events, and in other ways throughout the year. We will prioritize Initiatives for in-person Hackfests and other funding. And, we will will provide some program management support.[5]
Previously on Strategy 2028…
Our Themes
We started all of this a few years ago by asking for community input. Then, we grouped ideas we heard into Themes. These will be stable until the end of 2028 (when it’ll be time to do this whole thing over again). Under each theme, we have several Focus Areas. In bold, areas where we have a recently completed project, or something big in progress already. (See the footnotes.)
Accessibility
- Make our docs more accessible (“Learn”)
- Make our software more accessible (“Use”)
- Make project tooling more accessible (“Build!”)
Community Sustainability
Edition, Spins, Interests, and Outputs
- Release Stories for Marketing
- Easier Remixes[8]
- Refactor SIGs
Reaching the World
- Preinstalled Systems[9]
- Cloud & CI Providers
- Local Communities
Technical Innovation
- Containers and Flatpaks
Atomic Desktops and Image Mode [10] - Programming Language Ecosystems
- AI
Ecosystem Connections
- RHEL & CentOS[11]
- Other Downstreams
- Peer Distros and Upstreams
What’s Next? (Time to get tactical!)
Right now
We spent the bulk of our time getting more specific about our immediate future. Under each theme, Council members identified potential Initiatives that we believe are important to work on next. We came up with a list of thirteen — which is way more than we can handle at once. We previously set a limit of four Initiatives at a time. We decided to keep to that rule, and are planning to launch four initiatives before Flock.
We also tagged each of these with a Council member’s name. That Council member will probably be either the Initiative Lead or Executive Sponsor, and is accountable for finding the people for both of those roles (or formally passing back the responsibility).
The Initiatives we’re planning right now are:
1. Editions block on a11y
Ecosystem Connections.
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2. GitOps Experiment
Communications/Collaboration Tools
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3. Gitforge Migration
Communications/Collaboration Tools
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4. AI Devtools Out-of-Box
Tech Innovation
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Next up
[details tk]
5. bugzilla archive
6. discussions to discussions
7. get our containers story straight
8. formal, repeatable plan for release marketing
9. more Fedora Ready!
10. Mindshare funding for regional Ambassador planning events
11. Silverblue & Kinoite are ready to be our desktop Editions, with bootc
12. CoreOS, IoT, and Atomic Desktops shoare one base image
13. Out-of-box AI dev experience
Conclusion
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For this purpose, we are using a broad definition of contributor. That is: 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. A contribution is any product of such activities. So, active contributors for a week is the count of people who have made at least one contribution during that time. ↩︎
Um, yeah, I know that we don’t have a public dashboard with our estimate of this number yet. That’s because when we started, we quickly realized we need data scientist help — we need to make sure we’re measuring meaningfully. ↩︎
The Fedora Council has two elected positions, representatives from Mindshare and FESCo, and Leads for each Community Initiative. If you care about where we are going as a project, you could be the person in one of those seats! ↩︎
Of course, this plan can evolve, but any major changes should be brought back to the Council. ↩︎
“Nagging”, says Aoife. ↩︎
Forgejo migration, my continuing Quixotic yet serious drive to move away from mailing lists ↩︎
Fedora Ready. Special thanks to @joseph and @roseline-bassey ↩︎
Fedora bootc, again ↩︎