I give props to @bcotton since he was the first person I heard use the “lottery factor” to describe this phenomenon.
My first read of the top post was that these are three well-defined goals with a clear, unifying mission. It may be abstract to an extent, but the picture here of the strategic plan also deserves credit as an already-refined vision. Additionally, it comes with good supporting documentation (e.g. link-outs to the prior strategy and the 1-hour video presentation from Nest 2022).
What is drafted out in this topic is abstract enough to allow for additional feedback, but detailed enough where we can scrutinize what gets attention as a headlining goal for the next five years.
If we did not organize them that way, how do we better distinguish mentorship and onboarding experiences in other high-level goals? These two topics feel underrepresented in the five year view, given their importance. I also want mentoring and improved onboarding highlighted in accessibility-related work. I also want mentoring and improved onboarding in growing beyond the Editions.
It might be inherent that mentoring and improved onboarding go naturally with these goals. However, I want to deliberately underline them as a high-level goal. In 2023, I intend to explore interest in a Council Objective for community onboarding. Additionally, It aligns to places I want to spend more time in with my role in Fedora.
To be fair, “techy stuff” doesn’t sound nearly as inspiring as “Accessibility for everyone”.
In either case, I am skeptical whether splitting the high-level goals into two different “tech” and “community” goals is the right approach either. I think it oversimplifies what we want to do, when we have the ability to be more specific.
I understand the intent to group both engineering/technical and community/social things together. Every tech goal should have a community component. For example, if an outcome of Goal 3 were to deliver a new way of building Remixes, we should also pair that with a metric like “Support the rollout of three new community Remixes during a two-release cycle period.”
But a community lens in all goals should not reduce the necessity for a high-level goal that looks closely at topics like mentoring and onboarding. Separating them out further into more defined subject areas gives them more weight and space from each other, so they are distinct and easier to plan around.
Here is a counter-proposal:
Accessibility for Everyone
- Distribution a11y: Making sure we build an operating system that works for everyone, so people who have disabilities or other challenges using conventional interfaces can access and connect to a free & open operating system.
- Community a11y: Building our websites, infrastructure, and community tools in a way that enables a wider group of people than before to access the things we build together as a community.
Innovation and leadership in the distro space
- Storytelling: Helping to tell our story and share the message about what Fedora is, what we do, and how to be a part of the Fedora story. Highlighting and communicating more about the Fedora contributor experience.
- Metrics: Using our rich data to better understand how our community works, to know both our strengthes and weaknesses as supported by tangible data from our infrastructure.
- Technology: Containers, immutable operating system, native language stacks.
Growing beyond Editions
- Remixes: Improve the contributor experience and quality of life for people rebuilding Fedora in new and interesting ways. Make it easier for people to test out new ways to build Fedora together in an open way.
- provide distro value for special interests beyond specialized boot media [1]
Friends means Together [2]
- Mentoring: Build up our capacity to mentor as a community so we can build connections between different generations of contributors and enable diverse participation in Fedora leadership.
- Onboarding experience: Make it easy for anyone to discover what they can do in Fedora, why they should do it, and how they can get started as a new contributor.
I kept this one as written in the original outline because I realized I did not fully understand it. But I wanted to know the context because it sounds nice. ↩︎
Or some other name. I was riffing on the Friends Foundation, but it might be better to come up with a high-level title that is more concrete and tangible. ↩︎