Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #545: Request for Review of Flock 2026 CFP themes by 2025-11-11

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

@jflory7 filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #545. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.

Ticket text:

@@jflory7

Summary

Provide feedback, input, and/or approval of Flock 2026 Call for Proposals (CFP) themes by Tuesday, 11 November 2025

Background

The Flock Organizer Team is getting the party back together for 2026. One of the many things we are working on is the CFP to open before the end of this year. (Crazy, right??) As part of this process, we invite input from the various Fedora leadership bodies (Council, FESCo, Mindshare Committee, and EPEL Steering Committee) on the themes we have come up with so far.

Since we are planning to open the CFP before the end of the year, we do have a deadline for providing input, feedback, and comments. I am formally requesting any feedback on the 2026 CFP themes no later than Tuesday, 11 November 2025. This will leave enough time for the Flock Organizer Team to address feedback and open the CFP before the end of the year.

This is not a guarantee we will implement every single piece of feedback. We are asking four diverse committees for feedback, after all! However, the Flock Organizer Team respects the perspective and input of all our leadership bodies to help influence the content we want to have at Flock 2026. So, we ask for your collaborative input to help us build a community conference that we are all proud of.

Details

At the time of opening this ticket, we have come up with four themes. These themes do not necessarily correspond to tracks or how the actual schedule will be organized. However, it will be more like “tags” that a submitter can apply to their content. In an ideal world, every accepted session at Flock will clearly fit into at least one theme.

Here they are:

1. Freedom: The Open Frontier — This theme explores how Fedora pushes the boundaries of technological freedom. We invite proposals on FOSS approaches to Artificial Intelligence, the advancement of open hardware like RISC-V, the development of open standards, and the protection of data privacy. Sessions should focus on how our work in the Fedora Project creates a more free and collaborative technological world for everyone.
2. Friends: Our Fedora Story — This theme celebrates the people and practices that make our community unique. We seek proposals that share stories of mentorship, successful team collaboration, and effective onboarding within Fedora. Collaboration is key to our success, so sessions about our partnerships with other FOSS communities should center on the mutual benefits and the positive impact these relationships have on the Fedora Project.
3. Features: Engineering Fedora’s Core — As a contributor conference, this theme dives deep into the craft of building our distribution. We welcome sessions on improvements to our infrastructure, release engineering processes, and community tooling. This is the place for technical talks that showcase our engineering excellence and the collaborative work that makes a Fedora release possible, from code to final artifact.
4. First: Blueprint for the Future: Fedora 45 & 46 — This theme focuses on the near-term innovations that will define the next generation of Linux. With the next few Fedora Linux releases serving as the foundation for RHEL 11, this is a critical time. We are looking for forward-looking technical talks on the changes, features, and architectural decisions in F45 and F46 that will shape the future of the operating system, from the community desktop to the core of the enterprise.

Outcome

Council discusses and reviews the themes, provides input as comments to the Fedora Discussion topic opened by this ticket no later than Tuesday, 11 November 2025, and the Flock Organizer Team incorporates as much thoughtful feedback as we can before opening the CFP later this year.

(Also, +1/0/-1 votes would be nice to keep in Pagure per precedent.)

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

The deadline for feedback on this ticket was yesterday. I did not receive any formal input from the Council, although several Council folks were involved behind-the-scenes in coming up with the first draft.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be working with the Flock team to collect the feedback from all of the elected bodies in Fedora on the Flock themes, and incorporate this into a final version which will be shown in the CFP in December.

I am closing the Fedora Discussion topic and closing the Council ticket as resolved as this moves forward to the next phase!

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

Thank you to everyone who reviewed and provided feedback on the Flock to Fedora 2026 Call for Proposals (CfP) themes. The review process is now concluded, having collated input from the Fedora Council, FESCo, the Mindshare Committee, and the EPEL Steering Committee. Our goal for the revisions was to balance technical precision with community inclusivity, ensuring that every contributor sees a “home” for their work in these tracks.

Summary of Changes

• Inclusivity in Engineering: Based on feedback regarding the “Features” track, we explicitly added Quality Assurance (QA) and Packaging to the description. It is important that these contributors know their work belongs in our core engineering track.
• EPEL & Deliverables: We updated the “Features” and “First” tracks to broaden the scope from just “the distribution” to “Fedora deliverables.” We also explicitly added EPEL 11 alongside RHEL 11 as a future foundational topic.
• Theming Strategy: We received several creative suggestions regarding the titles and narrative voice. Ultimately, we decided to retain the standard “Four Foundations” (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) naming convention to maintain a consistent structural narrative for the conference. We focused our revisions on the descriptions to ensure the scope was accurate and welcoming.

Here is the final list of themes that will go live with the CfP:

• Freedom: The Open Frontier — This theme explores how Fedora pushes the boundaries of technological freedom. We invite proposals on FOSS approaches to Artificial Intelligence, the advancement of open hardware like RISC-V, the development of open standards, and the protection of data privacy. Sessions should focus on how our work in the Fedora Project creates a more free and collaborative technological world for everyone.
• Friends: Our Fedora Story — This theme celebrates the people and practices that make our community unique. We seek proposals that share stories of mentorship, successful team collaboration, and effective onboarding within Fedora. Collaboration is key to our success, so sessions about our partnerships with other FOSS communities should center on the mutual benefits and the positive impact these relationships have on the Fedora Project.
• Features: Engineering Fedora’s Core — As a contributor conference, this theme dives deep into the craft of building our distribution and other Fedora outputs. We welcome sessions on improvements to our infrastructure, release engineering processes, quality assurance, packaging, and community tooling. This is the place for technical talks that showcase our engineering excellence and the collaborative work that makes Fedora’s deliverables possible, from code to final artifact.
• First: Blueprint for the Future: Fedora Linux 45 & 46 — This theme focuses on the near-term innovations that will define the next generation of Linux. With the next few Fedora Linux releases serving as the foundation for RHEL 11 and EPEL 11, this is a critical time. We are looking for forward-looking technical talks on the changes, features, and architectural decisions in F45 and F46 that will shape the future of the operating system, from the community desktop to the core of the enterprise platforms.

Thank you again for helping us refine the direction of the conference!