Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Community Sustainability)

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

We’re working on Fedora Strategy 2028 — our next five-year plan. We are now reviewing those Objectives and their associated Impact. Read this guide for details on the current planning phase.

Focus Area: Community Sustainability

This area is the first part of the theme “Fedora leads in Linux distribution development.”^[1] Because

• Fedora is a community,
• everything we do is community oriented,
• and growing that community is our Guiding Star for Strategy 2028,

these Objectives are particularly fundamental to success of this entire plan.

There are many other possible goals which fit under Community Sustainability, but we picked these in particular because they are places where we can explore big, meaningful improvements and create models for other project to follow. (Of course, we should learn from other projects doing cool things in these areas too — innovation is the theme, but not just for its own sake. It’s the results that matter.)

Objectives & Impact

Objective	Impact
Everyone in Fedora has a mentor, and everyone in Fedora is a mentor.	Better onboarding. Growth for current contributors. Continuity of expertise and reduced lottery factor.
We have insight into community health and trends through meaningful metrics.	We know where we’re succeeding — and what needs help. By measuring more than git commits, we can highlight more than coding.
Modernize our communications tooling	An easier, more friendly face for the project, and higher quality discussion for all, leading to increased involvement and engagement.

The work at hand:

1. In this topic, discuss the overall focus area and how the three Objective / Impact pairs fit in. If you think we should re-word or re-orient “Reaching the World” to better describe the concept, this is the place. It’s also where we want to identify any crucial alternate or missing Objective / Impact ideas that fit the focus. Please review “What if something is missing?” — we already have an ambitious plan, so ideally we should now be looking at adjusting alignment and scope rather than brainstorming new ideas. But if there’s something very important that we’re missing, now is definitely better than later.
2. In separate topics per Objective (and associated Impact), discuss and validate each:
   • Objective Review: Everyone in Fedora has a mentor, and everyone in Fedora is a mentor
   • Objective Review: We have insight into community health and trends through meaningful metrics
   • Objective Review: Modernize our communications tooling

As outlined in the roadmap, this post will close in one month.

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1. The theme “Fedora Leads in Linux distribution development” was meant to be understood as “we demonstrate leadership in the primary thing that we do — being a Linux distro project”. See these previous comments on rewording the theme itself — we felt like “Linux distro space” was to jargony. And something like “Leads as a Linux distribution” can be misread as meaning “most popular”. Any suggestions? ↩︎

[bookwar (Aleksandra Fedorova)]

One specific thing I wanted to highlight here is that choice of Sustainability over just Reaching out.

Reaching out and bringing new people is an important work for a project and I think we progressed a lot on that front in last years.

But sustainable community needs all three aspects:

• reaching out so that new people are coming in,
• “reaching in” so that people who are already here stay and achieve their goals,
• the “upward mobility” within the project so that core positions in the project can be reached by any new or old contributor.

This sustainability-oriented approach I think should influence how we address our individual objectives.

For example, the modernization of the communication and tooling - while it does help with our outside image(aka the face of the project) we maybe should set the goal for it to be the brain of the project instead

We are not moving to it for the pretty face alone, we are addressing communication issues within the project as much as outside of it.

[dcantrell (David Cantrell)]

To begin with, I agree with the objectives and impact. I share Aleksandra’s with the choice of the word Sustainability. The first thing I think of when I see that word is that we want to maintain the status quo. No changes, just keep everything moving along as is with no problems. But I do not think that’s what is being conveyed with these objectives and impact.

Separately, I do not want us to underestimate the work involved with modernizing communication channels. Fedora is a well established project with a lot of long time contributors. We need to consider all community members with these changes or we risk alienating groups which can lead to the creation of silos. I do not know the best approach here, but I know that we can do it right. What most people want to do is contribute to the things that interest them and be able to interact with the community. When changes to that sort of thing come along that bring work on the part of the contributor, we need to work to minimize that impact. I feel this particular objective is much larger in scope than we think it is.

[sumantrom (Sumantro Mukherjee)]

Sustainability is the key to this one. The factors to sustain a community differ in ways from geo to geo, the communication channels and the type of community we cater to viz students, developer community, teachers, freelancers, social media tech streamers.
I will love to see ways by which we can go around re-emphasizing some of our amazing advocates and ambassadors to build more healthy, neuro-diverse communities (diversity is always where it starts) which can self-manage rather than have a central model of working.